The American Left in the Twentieth Century

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THE HARBRACE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

The American J
in the Twentieth
Century

John P. Diggins
University of California, Irvine

Under the General Editorship of

John Morton Blum, Yale University

HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, INC.

I-EJ New York Chicago San Francisco Atlanta
 Frontispiece: Magnum Photos, Inc.

© 1973 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

A11 rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission m
writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 0-15-502308-X

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

72-92269

Printed in the United States of America

Page 197 constitutes a continuation of the copy-

right page.
 Preface

The American Left in the twentieth century was born in America.

Contrary to popular belief, it was not the product of foreign powers
and alien ideologies. Although each Left generation would have its
rendezvous with European Marxism, Marxist ideas were usually CHI-
braced to support a radical movement that had already come into being.
Most Left intellectuals and activists in America read Jefferson and
Whitman before they read Marx or, later, Mao, and many caught the
flame of William Jennings Bryan or John Fitzgerald Kennedy before
they felt the fascination of Lenin or Castro. Sprouting from native
soil, the Left often erupted in a fury of radical innocence and wounded
idealism so peculiar to American intellectual history. We need only lis-
ten to the opening dialogue in the first major confrontation of the New
Left. At the height of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964,
student leader Mario Savio denounced the university "system" as a tech-
nological grotesquerie: "It becomes odious so we must put our bodies
against the gears, against the wheels and machines, and make the ma-
chine stop until we're free." The image of man throwing his body
against the mechanistic institution has always touched a rebellious im-
pulse deeply rooted in the American mind and character. In the nine-
teenth century Emerson cursed the "corpse-cold" nature of institutions
and protested a society in which "man is thus metamorphosed into a
thing"; Whitman called upon young Americans to "sing" of themselves
and to "resist much, obey little"; and Thoreau formulated his classic
doctrine of civil disobedience in the metaphors of human resurrection
and mechanistic doom; "Let your life be a counter friction to stop the
machine." Karl Marx told us a great deal about the nature of society
against which man rebels; Emerson's "The American Scholar" may tell
us even more about the emotional and intellectual sources of alienation V
 and idealism that have characterized the twentieth-century American
Left.
The American Left has generally been approached as either a footnote
to the history of the American labor movement, as an aspect of the
socialist and communist experiences in the United States, or as an
episode in the rich chronicle of American literary radicalism. To inte-
grate these dimensions in an interpretive synthesis, I have drawn upon
the excellent studies of Daniel Bell, Theodore Draper, and Daniel
Aaron. My own focus is primarily intellectual history as expressed
through generational experience. By intellectual history I do not mean
the disembodied "history of ideas." Rather, the concern here is with
the mind and moral temper of a generation as it arises from concrete
historical experience.
Within the limitations of this slender volume, I have three aims: to
describe the sensibilities and styles of thought that a radical intellectual
movement assumes as a means of mobilizing its emotional energies; to
explain the philosophical posture it adopts as a means of negating the
prevailing "truths" that sustain the existing order; and to analyze
briefly the historical factors that account for the "deradicalization" of
the Left as a generational phenomenon. The main focus therefore will
be not on the Left in general but on three different American Lefts: the
Lyrical Left of the World War I era, the Old Left of the l930's, and the
New Left of the l960's. The Lyrical Left had its emotional and intel-
lectual roots in the joyous, rhapsodic milieu of New York's Greenwich
Village. In contrast, the Old Left's desperate hopes and anxieties derived
from the Depression and the rise of European totalitarianism; and the
impulses of the New Left arose out of a deep sense of personal alienation
in a society of affluence and of political frustration produced by a cold
war abroad and a racial crisis at home. Each of these groups on the left
had different social origins and evolved from different historical con-
texts; and each projected different self-images, political objectives,
ideologies, and life styles. Lacking historical continuity, each Left is
best approached as a unique generational rebellion, for each tended to
deny paternity to its predecessor and enduring legacy to its successor.
Revolutions may devour their children; in the rites of political passage
that characterize generational revolts it is the children who slay their
vi fathers.

.9-
 The American Left resists precise definition, but there are ways of
approaching a historical understanding of its role in past and present
society. Part One o f The American Left in the Twentieth Century, de-
voted mainly to theoretical and problematic issues, attempts to explain
why simple definitions sacrifice nuance for neatness, why the Left may
be interpreted as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon, and why
the American Left found itself without a real, substantial proletariat.
Part Two deals specifically with the three American Lefts of the twen-
tieth century. Their respective histories hardly represent a success story.
But in America, the land that has denied each Left a second life, we can
learn from failure. Even while the Left draws its "poetry" from the per-
fect future, it cannot ignore the imperfect past. Marx stated the lesson
well in the preface to Capital: "We suffer not only from the living but
from the dead. Le mort saisit Ie Vif!"
l should like to express my appreciation to Anne Rogers and Peter
Clecak for their helpful criticisms of the manuscript; to Indy Aspinwall,
Phil Ressner, and Torn Williamson for their editorial suggestions; to
Susan Haggerty for digging up many priceless illustrations; to Daniel
Aaron for permitting me to examine his collection of unpublished ma-
terials; and to Iohn Morton Blum for his advice and encouragement.
I am also grateful to my "Left" colleagues at the University of California,
Irvine, for listening to a skeptic; and to my wife, Jacy, for listening
to an academic. The book is dedicated to my son and daughter, Sean and
Nicole, in the hope that their generation will prove .the old man wrong.

JOHN p. DIGGINS

vii
For Sean and Nicole

t
 \.

Contents

Preface V

PART ONE THEORY 1

1 The Problem of Definition 3

Popular Characteristics of the Left 3

Advocacy of Change 3
Political Ideals 5
Advocacy of Economic Democracy 9
Tradition of Dissent 10
Rationalism and Ideology 12

Historical Roles 14
The Left as Opposition 15
The Left as Negation 16
The Left as a Generational Experience 17
The Left as an Ally of the Working Class 20
Notes 25

2 The New Intellectuals 27

The- Left Intellectual 28

Conflict with Mazxian Socialists 28
Walling, Lippmann, and Eastman 31 ix
 The Historical Consciousness of the Left 34
The Role of Dewey and lames 834
The Task of Mind 36
Notes 38

3 Strangers in the Land: The Proletariat and

Marxism 39

Farmers and Industrial Workers 40

The Utopian Tradition 49

The Marxist Background 54

Three Leaders in American Socialism 63

Debs 63
DeLeon 65
Haywood 67
Notes 69

PART TWO HISTORY 71

4 The Lyrical Left 73

Early Raptures 74
Politics and Art 75
Diversity of Appeal 78
The New Review and The New Masses 79

Challenges and Conflict 81

War and the State 81

Bolshevism: The Triumph 88
X Bolshevism: The Disenchantment 94
 The Odysseys of Reed and Eastman: Two Patterns of
Disillusionment 96
Reed 96
Eastman 100
Notes 105

5 The Old Left 107

The Depression and Communism 108

The Popular Front 121

The Critique of Marxism: Legacy of the Old Left 136

Sociology: From Marx to Tocqueville 136
Economics: From Marx to Keynes 138
Political Science: Prom Marx to Madison 140
Theology: From Marx to Kierkegaard 142
Literature: From Marx to Melville 143
American History: From Marx to Locke 145
Philosophy: From Marx to lames 148

Pessimism and Relevance: The Gulf Between 151

Notes 152

6 The New Left 155

From Alienation to Activism 157

Antecedent Lefts: Di fferences and Similarities 162

From Port Huron to Peking 168

The Civil Rights Movement 168
Students for a Democratic Society 169 xi
 Progressive Labor Party 171
Offshoots of the Old 172
Black Militants 173

Decline with Influence 176

The Agency of Change 176

The Vietnam War 177
Repression 180
Factionalism and Suicidal Extremism 182

The "New Consciousness" and Herbert Marcuse 186

Notes 195
Photo Credits 197
Index 199

xii
 one
THEO Y
J

J
 The Problem
of Definition

He belonged to the 1e§t, which, as they say

in Spain, is the side of the heart, as the right
is that of the liver.
George Santayana, 1920

The true Left is that which continues faith-

fully to invoke, not liberty or equality, but
fraternity-in other words, love.
Raymond Aron, 1957

The first obstacle in a study of the American Left in the twentieth

century is the difficulty of discovering precisely what the American
Left is. One of the most elusive of all political categories, the Left does
not lend itself to tidy, fixed definitions. The following discussion
attempts to illustrate some of the fallacies and limitations contained
in common notions about the Left.

POPULAR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LEFT

Advocacy of Change
In the simplest terms "the Left" has generally designated those who
wish to change an existing order, and "the Right," those who wish to 3
 |

preserve it. This formulation does not tell us very much. For what is
at issue is not the demand for change but the motive for change. Indeed,
when viewed in historical perspective, the Left may be seen less as an
agent of change than as a response to it. More often than not the social
and political changes demanded by the Left were primarily reactions
to vast, disruptive economic and technological changes wrought by the
Right. Capitalists on the Right may not have created their own "grave-
diggers" when they produced an industrial working class, as Marx
prophesied, but in drastically transforming the character of modern
society, capitalists did more than anyone else to give birth to the Left.
Nineteenth-century industrialization in particular brought not only
soot and squalor but human atomization, depersonalization, and ex-
ploitation, reducing society to what Emile Durkheim called "a dust of
individuals." In the United States in the late nineteenth century it was
the men of the Left, the utopian and Christian socialists, who protested
the rapid economic changes that were destroying the intimate bonds
of human community. Significantly, one finds in the twentieth-century
American Left a curious ambiguity on the question of change; one is

1 Family dinner at a nineteenth-century commune, the Oneida Community, New York.

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never sure whether it desires to transform society in order to realize

new values or in order to restore lost ideals. By mid-century this am
bivalence seemed to have been resolved in favor of the values of the
past. At times the New Left of the l960's, with its pastoral idyll of small,
self-sufficient communities pursuing simple crafts, appeared to have
turned its back on change and modernity.
Political Ideals
Since a political phenomenon may be defined in light of its ideals,
it may be useful to consider whether the American Left possessed an
exclusive and coherent set of political ideals. The political principles
generally associated with the historic European Left are: liberty, justice,
equality, and democracy. Liberty, as one of the great ideals of the French
Revolution, developed in response to the classic antagonism between
the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, a postfeudal stage of historical conflict
that was not part of colonial America's political experience. Americans
were "born free," as Tocqueville observed, and did not have to struggle
for the political liberties that Europeans achieved only after years of
revolutionary turmoil. Moreover, the Anglo-Saxon idea of liberty was
essentially "negative liberty"-constitutional freedoms designed not
to enable man to realize his "higher nature" or "true self," but to protect
him against encroachments by the state.1 The Left sometimes resorts 5
 VOL. I SAN l=RAr4cxsco, JU1.Y 1,
I

1916 No. 15

GOV£KNM£NT

YOU AND 1 CANNOT LIVE IN THE SAME

LAND

3 The Left defends the liberal cause of a

free press doling the repressions of the
First World War.
to constitutional rights like free speech, as did the Lyrical Left when it
was harassed by the government during the First World War, or it may
repudiate these "bourgeois" liberties as a form of "repressive tolerance,"
as did some elements of the New Left.2 Love of liberty has been an occa-
sional affair of the Left, not a marriage.
It is also difficult to make justice and equality ideals peculiar to the
Left. For when we try to define these concepts we find that they are as
elusive to the Left as they have always been to the political philosopher.
If justice is understood as a legal principle, as fair and equitable treat-
ment, conservative lawyers and jurists may have as much claim to it
as does the Left. If justice is understood as a social ideal, as sympathy for
the poor and oppressed, the Left can hardly deny that many twentieth-
century liberal reformers and humanitarians have had a commitment
to social justice-and one that appeared more capable of enduring set-
backs and defeats. Equality is also a perplexing issue. It was Thomas
jefferson, not Karl Marx, who announced that "all men are created
equal," and the meaning of that ringing statement has troubled in-
tellectual historians ever since. When equality is cast as an economic
proposition-as equality of opportunity-it suggests an ethos of compe-
tition, achievement, and merit that the twentieth-century Left rejected
when it turned its back on liberal capitalism. On the other hand,
equality invoked as a moral injunction, according to which it becomes
man's "duty" to treat his fellow man as equal while raising him from
his unequal station, was taken by some sensitive radical intellectuals
to be patronizing.

Duty, like sacrifice and service, always implies a personal relation of

individuals. You are always doing your duty to somebody or something.
Always the taint of inequality comes in. You are morally superior to the
person who has duty done to him. If that duty is not filled with good-will
and desire, it is morally hateful, or at very best, a necessary evil,-one of
those compromises with the world which must be made in order to get
through it all. But duty without good-will is a compromise with our present
state of inequality, and to raise duty to the level of a virtue is to consecrate
that state of inequality forevermore.3

Democracy, another ideal of the historic European Left, is even more

difficult to use in reference to the twentieth-century American Left. In 7
nineteenth-century Europe the Left fought alongside the working class
to gain the ballot and win political power from the bourgeoisie. These
goals had largely been realized in America long before the appearance
of the first modern Left. Moreover, the peculiar sequence of American
political and economic history has worked to frustrate the American
Left. In many parts of continental Europe, where democracy lagged
behind industrialization, or where, as in southern and eastern Europe,
it failed to penetrate conditions of economic backwardness, workers
became class conscious before they became politically conscious. In
America, however, mass democracy developed at the same time as
bourgeois capitalism. The "specter" .of a democratic class war against
capitalism and property that haunted European conservatives turned
out to be more shadow than substance in America.
Early in the nineteenth century the conservative Federalist and Whig
parties did fear unlimited suffrage as a threat to property rights. Then,
in the tumultuous "cider campaign" of 1840, the Whigs, finally real-
izing there were no class-conscious "mobs" in America, nominated the
popular military hero General William Henry Harrison for president.
Stooping to conquer, wealthy New England Whigs sent Harrison around
the country in a large wagon with a log cabin on top and a barrel of hard
cider on tap for the crowds of workmen. The Whigs won the popular
vote from the Iacksonians, and democracy was safely domesticated.

.c- > *-*»-~-

4 Cartoon comment
on conservative Whig
»~- cultivation of the
working class in the
presidential campaign
of 1840. William Hen-
ry Harrison is the loco-
motive.

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The People's Lineiake care of the Locomotive

Thus, in contrast to Europe, where the struggle for democracy often
accompanied the struggle for socialism, democracy in America never
posed a direct threat to capitalism, since many Americans owned some
property, and even those who did not could dream of doing so. The one
exception to this is the South, where recent demands for the ballot by
disenfranchised blacks represent a struggle to alter both class and
political structures. But this exception also illustrates the dilemma of
using democracy as a defining goal of the Left. In the late nineteenth
century, American radicals could look upon the struggles of the work-
ing class as a genuine democratic expression because workers appeared
to constitute a growing majority of the population. The New Left, how-
ever, became involved with the civil rights and social goals Of power-
less minorities. If the historic European Left, as David Caute argues,
is to be defined as the attempt to realize "popular sovereignty," the
New Left in America will have to be defined as the attempt to realize
the sovereignty of the unpopular.4
Advocacy of Economic Democracy
Although nineteenth-century American history deprived the twen-
tieth-century American Left of political democracy as a goal, the ideal
of economic democracy was still far from realization. Liberalism may
have succeeded in democratizing political institutions and expanding
suffrage, but the Left realized that the masses would remain without
effective power as long as man's work, wages, and welfare were con-
trolled by those who owned the means of production. To extend democ-
racy from the political to the economic sphere became, therefore, the
characteristic goal of the Left. Whether economic democracy is auto-
matically realized when private enterprise is socialized remains a
speculative proposition. Nevertheless, in the past the American Left has
assumed that true freedom begins only when capitalism ends. Hence
the Left was nothing if not anticapitalist. All the Lefts of the twentieth
century were influenced by socialism; all advocated various programs
calling for public ownership of the means of production and democratic
control of economic activity. However the new social order was en-
visioned, competitive individualism would be replaced by some version
of the cooperative ideal in which man, freed from the economic neces- 9
 site of engaging in coerced labor, would realize his full nature in
creative work. Using an ticapitalisin as an exclusive categorical defini-
tion of the Left, however, creates some difficulties. In America liberal
reformers also have advocated public control of private enterprise, and,
indeed, some of the sharpest critics of capitalism have been men of the
Right. The attacks on the inhuinanity of the "free" economy by slavery
apologists like John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh, the penetrating
critiques of industrial capitalism by conservative writers like Allen
Tate and Irving Babbitt, and the diatribes against Wall Street by proto-
fascists like Ezra Pound and Lawrence Dennis are as caustic as any
editorial in Pravda or the Daily Worker. Anticapitalisrn has more than
one meaning; it is not necessarily synonymous with the Left.

Tradition of Dissent
The American Left may lay claim to a long and rich tradition of
radical dissent.5 The challenge of individual conscience against au-
thority and majority rule began with the Puritan antinomians of the
seventeenth century; it was carried forward by the abolitionists of the
nineteenth century; and it found its most recent expression in the
activities of civil-rights workers and draft resisters of the l960's. Yet
dissent itself cannot serve to define the Left in any meaningful sense.
Dissent is not a social philosophy but a tactic, a method of protesting
and communicating to the public in order to bring law more into
congruence with some ideal or higher law. Nor is dissent compatible
with democracy, for dissent involves conflict between autonomous
individual morality and political allegiance. As is liberty, dissent is
basically negative, an assertion of the integrity of the individual's
private conscience against both the coercion of the state and the
"tyranny of the majority." Moreover, the dissent tradition is highly
individualistic, occasionally anarchistic, and at times even spiritual
and mystical, whereas the Left comes alive in collective action and
seeks material solutions to social problems. The Left may hail Thoreau
as the most noble dissenter of all, the heroic "majority of one," who
went to jail rather than support a war and who dropped out of society
rather than conform to it, but the philosopher-poet of Walden Pond
10 deliberately refused to offer any radical program for transforming
5 and 6 Police harass abolitionists in late-nineteenth-century Boston (above) and
civil-rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 (below).

an

r- 15
,ens
GERS
in#
 7 Henry David Thoreau, nine-
teenth-century dissenter whose
radical ideas would never be
assimilated by the Marxist Left.

society other than advising men of "quiet desperation" to "simplify"

their needs.6 The twentieth-century American Left could find moral
inspiration in the dissent tradition; it had to look elsewhere for polit-
ical direction.
Rationalism and Ideology
Is it possible to define the Left by its belief systems and mental habits?
Does the Left possess a common world view and a common theory of
knowledge? Is there, in short, a systematic "mind" of the Left? It is a
widespread notion that the Left stands for rationality and intelligence
and has an optimistic belief in the essential goodness of human nature.
On the other side, the Right is said to stand for the primacy of emotion
over reason, the elemental sinfulness of man, and hence the imper-
fections of the "human condition." This dichotomy may have been
somewhat true during the Revolutionary era, when men of the Enlight-
enment like Tom Paine proclaimed the infinite capacities of human
intelligence, and conservatives like John Adams tried to demonstrate
the infinite illusions of reason. But in the nineteenth century radical
reform movements were often inspired by religious "awakenings,"
philosophical idealism, or the romantic cult of moral intuition; and
12 the first Left in the twentieth century stressed the passions of poetry

.---______l.

vr
and "feeling" as much as the power of reason. Not until the full impact
of Marxism in the 1930's was there a marked return to the worship of
reason, science, and technological progress. It was this philosophical
legacy of the Old Left, however, that the New Left repudiated, and in
doing so the young radicals of the 1960's displayed a deep uncertainty
about rationalism, even while invoking the political ideals that had
been born in the eighteenth-century Age of Reason. The antagonist
still remained bourgeois society, which had disfigured original human
nature by its demands for social conformity, economic competition, and
sexual repression. Yet, the New Left had few illusions about the liberat-
ing power of the historic Enlightenment. At the turn of the century
American socialists read Julius Weyland's Appeal to Reason; in the
l960's, "reason" was the enemy and the vibrations of "soul" the real
test of truth.
If rationalism does not define the mentality of the Left, neither does
ideology. In America ideology is a bad word. Supposedly it is a European
habit alien to the "pragmatic" wisdom of the American character. This

8 Tom Paine, Revolu-

tionary War patriot and
theoretician who believed
that man would be liber-
ated through the exercise
of simple reason and corn-
mon sense.
 understanding of the term is curious, for it was Marx who first analyzed
ideology as a deception and an "illusion." From the Marxist viewpoint,
ideology is a rationalization, a verbal "cloak" of ideas behind which
true "reality" lies. The American Left, insofar as it has sought to "un-
mask" ideas like the "laws of the market place" and lay bare the harsh
social realities hidden therein, can rightly be described as anti-ideo-
logical. But there is another meaning to ideology, one which emerged
in the late l930's when jaded radicals, having lost faith in the "apoca-
lyptic" prophecies of Karl Marx, dismissed Marxism itself as an ideol-
ogy. Ideology now took on an invidious connotation and came to mean a
set of fixed ideas derived from unworkable philosophical systems and
unproved scientific laws. Henceforth, to be labeled "ideological" meant
that one was hooked on "blueprints," on abstract principles and theo-
retical doctrines that had nothing to do with reality. In this respect the
"end of ideology" enounced by veterans of the Old Left after the Second
World War was a way of confessing that they themselves had been out
of touch with reality.7 Yet if the description "ideological" may be
applied to the Old Left because of its rigid commitment to Marxist
doctrines, this description cannot be applied to the American Left in
general. The Lyrical Left of 1913 rose up in revolt against abstract doc-
trine, embraced a pragmatic socialism that was as open ended as free
verse, and proudly heralded itself as conqueror without a creed. Simi-
larly the New Left originally saw itself as the first generation of exis-
tential radicals who could live without doctrinal illusions. Ideology
was the "brain disease" of the Old Left, taunted some young radicals
of the l960's, and Marxism was its "head trip."

HISTORICAL ROLES
The characteristics most often used to define the Left-the demand for
change; political ideals like justice, equality, and democracy; anti-
capitalism and the tactic of dissent; the mentalities of rationalism and
ideology-are either so broad as to include many other political ele-
ments or so narrow as to apply to one American Left and not to others.
Nevertheless, there are some ways of thinking about the Left that may
enable us to approach a historical understanding of its function and
14 role in twentieth-century America.
9 American Communist Party members of the 1930's march in a May Day parade, traditional
annual denlonstration of opposition and of solidarity within the Left.

The Left as Opposition

Without a Right and Center there most likely would be no Left. For
the Left is born and takes its shape as an opposition. Since it defines
itself by what it rejects as well as what it affirms, the Left is better
understood when seen against the background of other political philos-
ophies. In America the two philosophies opposing the Left have been
conservatism and liberalism. The conservative Right has generally
stood for the primacy of family, religion, authority, and property. The
radical Left, in contrast, has called for the liberation of the young, the
demystification of religious beliefs, the destruction of traditional au-
thority, and the abolition of private property. The liberal Center-the
Left's chief antagonist-has generally been committed to a pluralistic
balance of power, an equilibrium of class interests, an ethic of oppor-
tunity and achievement, and a realistic vision of human limitations.
The Left, in contrast, has demanded the liquidation of institutionalized
power and interest politics, the elimination of social classes, the replace-
ment of competitive life with one of fraternal participation and coopera-
tive fulfillment, and unlimited visions of human possibility. Even as a
political opposition, however, the Left cannot be understood in terms 15
10 Columbia University students protest the university's acquisition of
black ghetto property for expansion. This practice, a tendency in many educa-
tional institutions, went largely unquestioned by older generations.

of traditional American politics. The American Left has never, on the

national level, been a political party or an effectively organized political
movement. Nor has it ever enjoyed political power. Rather, it has been
something of a spontaneous moral stance, mercurial and sporadic,
suspicious of power and distrustful of politics.
The Left as Negation
Just as the political position of the Left may be identified by its role
in opposition, its philosophical temperament may be characterized by
its sense of negation. The Left has opposed its enemies by refusing to
engage in their practice of politics as the "art of the possible," and it has
tried to negate their philosophical foundations by affirming its own
vision of an "impossible ideal" as a truth about to be realized.
What do we mean by the concept of negation? In simplest terrors, to
negate is to deny that the prevailing understanding of reality is valid.8
Whereas conservatives or liberals may regard war, poverty, or aliena-
tion as permanent features of historical reality, the Left regards such
16 phenomena as transitory features of the stages of history-real aspects
of immediate historical experience, but not ultimate reality itself. Thus,
rather than defending existing conditions, as do conservatives, or Ie-
forming them, as do liberals, the Left has sought to transform present
society in the hope of realizing "unborn ideals" that transcend his-
torical experience. Unceasing and uncompromising in its attack on
present reality, the Left's mentality is fraught with tension. The left-
wing intellectual is acutely sensitive to the gap between the real and the
ideal, between what is and what ought to be. The perpetual dilemma of
the Left is that it has had to treat the impossible as if it were possible, to
accept the huge gap between the real and the ideal and yet struggle to
realize the ideal. The philosophical burden the Left has historically
assumed would be appreciated by William James (see Chapter 2) as well
as by Karl Marx, for the Left recognizes that ideals presently unattain-
able will never be realized unless they are first articulated as an act
of belief.
In attempting to articulate their visionary ideals, and thereby negate
the accepted view of reality, different American Lefts have displayed
different intellectual resources and temperaments. The Lyrical Left
tended at first to rely more upon the regenerating force of culture and
the imaginative power of poetry as a means of manifesting "premature
truths"; the Old Left saw in the "science" of Marxism a method of his-
torical understanding that would enable man to triumph over the
"contradictions" of capitalism; and the New Left at first embraced an
existential ethic of moral choice and human commitment as a way of
overcoming the paradoxes of alienation.
The Left as a Generational Experience
The concept of negation is also useful in understanding the Left as
a generational experience. There is little historical continuity and even
less political sympathy among different generations of the American
Left. The ex-radicals of the 1930's and the young radicals of the 1960's
often spoke past one another whenever they did not shout one another
down. The hostility that separated these two Lefts was due not only to
different values and attitudes, but also to profoundly different percep-
tions of reality and history. When the Old Left emerged from the 1930's
and underwent the experience of deradicalization, it gradually came to 17
 terms with the imperfections of American society, re-embraced Amer-
ican institutions and values, and politically (though not culturally)
reconciled itself to existing reality. Certainly not all veterans of the
Old Left engaged in what C. Wright Mills called the "great American
celebration." Still, we must ask why the New Left saw so clearly the
injustices that many members of the Old Left tended to ignore. How did
it happen that human minds concerned with the same environment
perceived that environment so differently?
It is not enough to say that people of different age groups will see
some things differently. How one interprets existing conditions is
largely determined by whether one believes they can be fundamentally
changed. When the Old Left lost its belief that existing historical reality
could be radically transformed, it lost its capacity for negation. To call
this behavior of the Old Left a "cop out" is as uncharitable and mis-
leading as to describe the activities of the New Left as a "nihilistic ego
trip"-epithets often hurled across the generational barricades. From
the perspective of intellectual history, what divided these two radical
generations was an implicit debate involving two ponderous questions:
What is real? and What is possible? When the Old Left intellectuals
abandoned all hope of radical transformation, they tended to accept
what existed as the true reality to which all human ideals must con-
form if they are to be realized. The New Left, innocent of the burden
of historical experience, rejected this definition of reality and defiantly
invoked a new sense of the possible. Thus the institutions that ex-
radicals embraced as real represented to younger radicals the very sys-
tem that was rejected as unreal because of its alleged irrationality
and immorality. Moreover, in denying that war, poverty, racism, and
alienation were inherent in the structure of historical reality or in the
nature of human existence, the New Left also challenged the concept of
reality and human nature that had morally numbed America during
the time of the "silent generation" of the 1950's. In so doing the New
Left had done for its generation what the Old Left and Lyrical Left had
once done for theirs: it articulated a new historical vision, a new sense
of reality and possibility that transcended the given state of things, a
new consciousness of the negating ideal-that which ought to exist,
18 but does not.
11 Art Young, radi-
cal cartoonist, com-
ments on the genera-
tional experience in
1927. The young
flapper says: "Moth-
er, when you were a
girl, didn't you find
it a bore to be a vir-
gin?"

A generation is not simply a people coexisting in the same time

period. What identifies a group as belonging to a particular generation
are both a shared perspective on common historical problems and a
similar strategy of action taken as a result of that perspective. For the
Left in particular, cultural forces and historical crises operate as a
"formative experience" upon the mind of a new generation, which in
turn shapes its impressions of the world, crystallizes its awakening
convictions, and brings into focus its distinct self-consciousness as
participants in a common destiny. A radical nucleus of a generation is
formed when some young intellectuals or students, as a result of com-
mon "destabilizing" experiences, begin to feel, articulate, and defend
the identity of certain values and ideals in a society that is indifferent
or hostile.9 Thus, the Lyrical Left rebelled against the philistinism of
nineteenth-century Victorian culture and the tawdry machine politics
of the two-party system; the Old Left against the political defeatism and
cultural despair of the "lost generation" of writers of the 1920's and the
"normalcy" politics of the Coolidge era; the New Left against the alien-
ating mass culture of corporate life and the apathetic "consensus" poli-
tics of the l950's. Similarly, the common historical ordeals faced by each
Left served to unify radical perspectives and create a generational
identity. For the Lyrical Left, those ordeals were the labor struggle, the
First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Red Scare, and the
socialist-communist split; for the Old Left they were the Depression, 19
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the threat of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, Stalinism and the Moscow
trials, and the Russo-German nonaggression pact; for the New Left they
were the domestic racial crisis, the wars in Southeast Asia, Cuba, and
China, and the politics of confrontation with the resultant fear of re-
pression. These ordeals left deep and lasting impressions on each gener-
ation of the twentieth-century American Left. And the very uniqueness
of these experiences explains in part why radicals of different genera-
tions saw themselves as dissimilar, why they often refuse to listen to
one another, why they do not deign to learn from one another.

The Left as an Ally of the Working Class

When we speak of the Left, two different social strata come to mind:
the intellectuals and the workers. Historically the Left in America as
20 well as in Europe has attempted to synthesize a single political force
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out of these two, forging something of an intellectual-worker alliance

that would fuse culture and life, thought and action, truth and power.
Indeed, one of the most persistent characteristics of the American Left
in the twentieth century is this effort of young intellectuals and stu-
dents to sink their idealistic roots into the material struggles of the
working class and to find common cause with the oppressed and ex-
ploited. Thus, at first glance it might seem as though the Left could be
defined by identifying those social groups it supports and those which
it opposes. Using this mode of analysis, the sociologist and political
scientist Robert Maclver located the Left as follows:

The right is always the party sector associated with the interests of the
upper or dominant classes, the left with the sector expressive of lower
economic or social classes, and the center that of the middle classes. His-
torically this criterion seems acceptable. The conservative right has de- 21
 fended entrenched prerogatives, privileges and powers; the left has attacked
them. The right has been more favorable to the aristocratic position, to the
hierarchy of birth and wealth; the left has fought for the equalization of
advantage or of opportunity, for the claims of the less advantaged. Defense
and attack have met, under democratic conditions, not in the name of
class but in the name of principle; but the opposing principles have
broadly corresponded to the interests of different classes. 10

There are some difficulties with this class-representation analysis of

the Left. Most left-wing intellectuals do not come from the working
class, and it is questionable whether their ideals "always" correspond
to those of the "lower economic or social classes." On occasion radical
writers may have struck a sympathetic response when they addressed

13 Scene 's the Home-

stead strike, | early in-
stance of Left-supported
working-class assertion.
themselves tO the economic concerns of industrial workers. But on such
issues as racism, nationalism, culture, religion, and sex they often
found themselves in another world. Even the immediate economic
interests of the working class can be contrary to the ideals of the Left.
At the turn of the century, Left intellectuals failed to instill a spirit of
class consciousness in the working class, while labor leaders success-
fully propounded more conservative principles of opportunity and
upward social mobility. Since its cultural ideals are scarcely a replica
of the class interests of labor, the Left cannot simply be defined by
asserting that it will always be in support of working-class demands.
Why, then, did radical intellectuals in America seek the comradeship
of the lower class? One interpretation has been offered by the historian
Christopher Lasch. According to Lasch, "the rise of the new radicalism
coincides with the emergence of the intellectual as a distinctive social
type." Focusing on the changing nature of the social order at the turn
of the century, Lasch attempts to show that the "intellectual class . . . is
a distinctly modern phenomenon, the product of cultural fragmentation
that seems to characterize industrial and post-industrial societies."
This cultural disintegration resulted from the decline of tradition,
community, and, above all, parental authority, which explains why
"the revolt of the intellectuals so often took the form of a rebellion
against the conventional family." And this "estrangement" of the in-
tellectuals from the "middle class" and from the "dominant values of
American culture" also explains why the intellectual "identified him-
self with other outcasts and tried to look at the world from their point
of view" and to "see society from the bottom up."11
Lasch's sociological explanation is richly suggestive but historically
limited. The rise of the radical intellectual did not necessarily coincide
with the emergence of the "cultural fragmentation" that characterized
the social structure of "industrial or post-industrial societies." Well
before the full impact of industrialism, the Transcendentalists and
utopian reformers of the 1830's and 1840's felt themselves at odds with
the prevalent values of American society, and several Brook Farm
utopians tried to identify with the plight of the lower class. Moreover,
some of the leading intellectuals of the Lyrical Left of 1913 neither
broke with their parents nor rebelled against their familial heritage. 23
14 and 15 Social philosopher
Thorstein Veblen (above) and
poet Ezra Pound (below), two
alienated intellectuals whose
radical critiques of society did
not lead to the radical politics of
the Left.
Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, and John Reed had the fondest memories of
their parents and family upbringing. "When I was sixteen," Reed
recalled,
I went East to a New Iersey boarding school, and then to Harvard College,
and afterward to Europe for a year's travel; and my brother followed me
through college. We never knew until later how much our mother and
father denied themselves that we might go, and how he poured out his life
that we might live like rich men's sons. He and mother always gave us
more than we asked, in freedom and understanding as well as material
things."

Eastman described his father as "kind, reasonable, patient, coura-

geous, sweet-tempered, generous, truthful, just, tempered," and his
beloved mother as "heroic" and "saintly." $a As for the Old Left intel-
lectuals of the Depression, they scarcely questioned the family as a re-
pressive social institution. Indeed, it is not easy to find a direct causal
relationship between social origin and political position. Many middle-
and upper-class American intellectuals of the First World War genera-
tion experienced social estrangement in one form or another, but not
all estranged intellectuals became radicals of the Left. One of the most
estranged writers of the era, the social philosopher Thorstein Veblen,
remained aloof from politics, while another, the poet Ezra Pound, de-
nounced America as a "botched civilization" and went off to Europe to
become the rhapsodist of Italian Fascism. Until we understand the mys-
teries of character and personality, we probably will not know why
some alienated intellectuals became Left radicals and others did not.
Meanwhile, rather than explain the Left intellectual as a social type,
perhaps it is best to try to see the Left as it saw itself-as a new intel-
lectual class with a profoundly radical view of the nature of history and
reality.

Notes
1 Sir Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958).
1 Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," in Herbert Marcuse et al., A Critique of
Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 1965}, pp. 81-117.
3 Randolph Bourne, "This Older Generation," The Atlantic, CXVI (Sept., 1915),
385-91. 25
 4 David Cause The Left in Europe Since 1789 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1966.
5 Stoughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalisrn ( N e w York: Pan-
theon, 1968).
6 For a critique of Lynd's argument, see Iohn P. Diggins, "Thorea1.1, Marx, and the
'Riddle' of Alienation," Social Research, XXXIX (Winter, 1972), 571-98.
7 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
(New York: The Free Press, 1960); on the conceptual ambiguities surrounding this
issue, see John P. Diggins, "Ideology and Pragmatism: Philosophy or Passion?"
American Political Science Review, LXIV (Sept., 1970), 899-906.
91n his classic work, Ideology and Utopia, Karl Mannheim first pointed out a crucial
epistemological distinction that separates the Right from the Left: the former uses
ideology to defend the existing order as real and valid, and the Left projects utopian
ideas to challenge that order as false and to direct activity toward undermining it.
Since "utopian" is so often used as a term of abuse to deride any new radical idea
as a pipedream, it seems more appropriate to use the term "negation."' Much of my
discussion of this idea is drawn from Leszek Kolakowsld's illuminating essay, "The
Concept of the Left," in Toward a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today
(New York: Grove Press, 1969), pp. 67-83.
9Kar1 Mannheim, "The Problem of Generations," in Essays on the Sociology of
Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1959) .
10 Robert Maclver, quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases
of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1963), p. 232.
11 Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual
As a Social Type (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. ix-xviii.
12]ohn Reed, "Almost Thirty" (unpublished manuscript, Houghton Library, Harvard
University), p. 8.
13l\/lax Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (New York: Harper, 1948), pp. l5-26; see also
Floyd Dell, Homecoming: An Autobiography (New York- Farrar, 1933].

26
 The New
Intellectuals

How awful for the world . . . that there are

40,000 revolutionary students in Russia, with-
out a proletariat or even a revolutionary peas-
antry behind them and with no career before
them except the dilemma: Siberia or abroad -
to western Europe. If there is anything which
might ruin the western European movement,
then it would have been this import of 40,000
more or less educated, ambitious, hungry Rus-
sian nihilists; all of them officer candidates
without an army.
Engels to Marx, 1870

To see the Left as an intellectual class is to accept the Left on its own
terms, for it was with this self-image that several young radical writers
and college graduates first attempted to ally themselves with the social-
ist movement in the United States. The appearance of the first Left of the
twentieth century as an intellectual class raises three important ques-
tions: What exactly was meant by "intellectual"? Why did many social-
ists at first resist the efforts of intellectuals to enter their ranks? Who
were these radical, upper-class intellectuals who were finally hailed as a
vanguard and recognized as the first genuine American Left of the
twentieth century? Z7
 THE LEFT INTELLECTUAL
The term "intellectual" first came to be used to describe a group at the
time of the Dreyfus affair (1898-1906), when the radical French intellec-
tual community rose to defend the Republic against the reactionary
anti-Dreyhlsard's. From the beginning, the term conveyed clear politi-
cal implications: ethically it implied that men of ideas should serve as
the authentic conscience of society; socially it described a class of writ-
ers, artists, journalists, and professors who felt themselves separated
from society; ideologically it suggested that those who chose intellectual
life as a vocation should repudiate the interests of their bourgeois class
and remain forever independent of the corrupting power of institutions.
William James, the first American known to use the term, touched upon
some of these implications when he wrote in response to the Dreyfus af-
fair: "We 'intellectuals' in America must all work to keep our precious
birthright of individualism and freedom from these institutions
[church, army, aristocracy, royalty]. Every great institution is perforce a
means of corruption-whatever good it may do. Only in the free person-
al relations is full ideality to be found."1
Con flict with Marxian Socialists
Several radical intellectuals who graduated from college between the
turn of the century and the First World War tried to find their full ideal-
ity in the American socialist movement. They were young writers whose
first commitment was to culture, to those elevating pursuits that deepen
the mind and heighten the imagination. This commitment created a
misalliance, for the Marxist socialists who came to dominate American
radicalism aher the turn of the century possessed no theory of a cultural
class. Indeed, the idea that a revolutionary movement needed an intel-
lectual class appeared almost alien to Marxist theory-or at least to the
American version of Marxism that prevailed in the years preceding the
First World War. American Maridsm was characterized by an optimis-
tic faith in natural science and historical progress. Since history was un-
folding rationally according to predetermined "laws," society could be
studied through the same empirical methods used in natural science.
This deterministic view of history presented an awkward problem for
28 the cultural intellectuals who wanted to become socialists and yet re-
main men of ideas. If socialism would develop automatically from the
natural laws of history, what role could the radical intellectual per-
form? If history is determined by economic changes, what role could
ideas play in the transformation of society? In the struggle to liberate the
working class, Marx saw no crucial function for the moral idealism and
cultural criticism of the intellectual class. It is one of the curious ironies
of history that Karl Marx, the greatest radical mind of the nineteenth
century, developed a theory of history that offered no decisive or central
role for the radical mind of the intellectual.2
Issues similar to these occupied socialist theorists from the turn of the
century to the outbreak of the First World War. In 1900, The Interna-
tional Socialist Review, a scholarly journal edited in Chicago by the his-
torian A. M. Simons, published an essay entitled "Socialism and the
intellectuals," by the French writer Paul Lafargue, son-in-law of Karl
Marx. Simons and Lafargue warned against the "bourgeois intellectual"
who would enter the workers' movement, not as a combatant in the
class struggle, but as a déclasse "aristocrat" and "mandarin/' a "brain
worker" who wanted to open the movement to "all amiable exploiters."
The volatile Daniel DeLeon, the most militant of American Marxists,
took up the attack against the intelligentsia. Stressing the need for work-
ing-class unity, DeLeon lashed out at the "pernicious influence" of the

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16 Daniel DeLeon, leading

American Marxist theoretician,
critic, and opponent of emerging
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 intellectual who "is incapable of learning; of seeing that he joins the
Movement, not for the Movement's sake, but for his own." At every crit-
ical moment, complained DeLeon, the intellectual betrays the move-
ment, sacrificing its "interests to his own crossed malevolence." This
curious attack on intellectuals by intellectuals did not go unanswered.
John Spargo, one of the first Americans to write a book on Karl Marx,
described the leaders of the anti-intellectual campaign as "unsuccessful
'intellectuals'-lawyers without clients, authors without publishers,
professors without chairs, ministers without pulpits." But intellectuals
continued to be attacked from both sides of the Left, the radical wing de-
picting them as dispossessed professionals seeking soft positions in the
labor movement, the conservative wing as dangerous adventurers and
extremists who joined the movement to overcome the boredom of bour-
geois existence. And perhaps both sides could agree with a coal miner
who charged that the "radical bourgeois" was more concerned with such
goals as free love than with the "stomach ideals" of the workers. Even
more disturbing, intellectuals potentially had feet of clay: "They can
steal over into the capitalist camp at any time-we can't. They can retire
from the firing line-we can't."3
Above the crossfire of polemics hovered a deeper philosophical debate
-that between materialism and idealism. Many party socialists unsym-
pathetic to intellectuals were steeped in a crude concept of economic
determinism and mechanical materialism, a scientific philosophy of
history that precluded subjective ideas and creative imagination. The
independent radical intellectuals, on the other hand, insisted that their
function was to infuse the movement with idealism and theoretical vi-
sion, thereby making the implicit claim that they possessed a conscious-
ness that transcended the working class. The intellectuals' case gained a
better hearing shortly before the First World War. With the rising pres-
tige of French socialism, which stressed lean Jaures's ethical idealism
and a radical version of Henri Bergson's "élan vital," the role of moral
will and intuition found a place in radical theory. The intellectual
could now be regarded as an active and creative force. And if ethical
consciousness was a determining influence, perhaps revolutions
could originate within the mind, even the mind of the avant-garde
30 intellectual. 4
 Yet by no means had the issue been resolved in 1914 when Robert
Rives LaMonte wrote his provocative essay on "The New Intellectuals"
in the New Review, a theoretical journal of American Marxism. The
essay celebrated the appearance of a new radical intelligentsia that
emerged just before the war. These young rebels differed from two dis-
tinct previous radical types: the eager provincial who, LaMonte said,
failed to build a socialist movement because, "sneering" at the doctrine
of "scientific socialism," he "contemptuously" dismissed Marxism; and
the enthusiastic immigrant student from New York's east side, a "one-
book man" who failed because "his intensity of concentration upon
Marx deprived him of that broad general culture without which it is
impossible to use the Marxian viewpoint and method fruitfully." But
the younger radicals, the author pointed out, were free of textual dog-
matism, anxious to absorb Nietzsche along with Marx and thus become
"steeped in the culture of the day and generation." Still, it was doubtful
that the young radicals had successfully resolved the issue of determin-
ism versus freedom and materialism versus idealism. They advocated a
"pragmatic" socialism that was "anthropocentric," that placed the "con-
scious, willing individual" at the center of history. Quoting from a book
by one of the young intellectuals, LaMonte noted that what they meant
by socialism was not the economic system but "the will, the will to
beauty, order, neighborliness, not infrequently a will to health." Nev-
ertheless, what impressed LaMonte was the free-spirited pragmatism of
their "winsome open-rnindedness," their "breadth of vision," and their
"intellectual and moral receptivity." He thus welcomed the new libera-
tors of the mind: "Hail to the New Intellectuals! May they increase and
flourish!"5 And flourish they did.
Walling, Lippmann, and Eastman
LaMonte had singled out William English Walling, Walter Lipp-
mann, and Max Eastman. These "New intellectuals" represented a new
breed of radical: intellectuals of upper-class sensibilities and lower-class
sympathies, original thinkers capable of turning easy answers into
harder questions and stimulating new trains of thought, men of action
as well as ideas. Walling, a founder of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, was one of the few American socialist 31
 -»-

17 and 18 William English Walling (left) and Walter Lippmann (right), prominent among
the New Intellectuals.

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2. Max Eastman, another of
the New Intellectuals, ad-
dresses a crowd in Union
Square, New York City, in 1917.

intellectuals willing to face squarely the theoretical difficulties of so-

cialism. Lippmann, a brilliant young Harvard graduate who had run as
a socialist mayoralty candidate in upstate New York, wrote his first
book on political philosophy in 1913 at the remarkable age of twenty-
three. Eastman, a handsome, flamboyant poet, a Columbia University
philosophy teacher, and an organizer of the early feminist and pacifist
movements, was one of the dominant figures in American cultural life
between 1913 and 1922. These three intellectuals represented a nucleus
of important writers who had joined with other young radicals to pub-
lish the New Review and The Masses, the organs of the first American
Left of the twentieth century. Around 1913 many of these writers flocked
to New York's Greenwich Village and formed a colony of infidels and
iconoclasts who spoke of the coming American "renaissance" and cele-
brated everything and anything that was new. Here, for a brief moment
in American history, cultural rebellion and social revolution seemed to
have come together in a thrilling synthesis of art and activism. The ra-
diant illusion was short lived, but while it lasted it gave the first Left its
distinct bohemian flavor. 33
 THE HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE LEFT
This Lyrical Left is discussed in a subsequent chapter. At this point it is
necessary to say something about the historical consciousness that char-
acterized the Left and distinguished it from other expressions of politi-
cal and cultural radicalism.
The Role of Dewey and lames
Eastman, Lippmann, and Walling had been influenced by various
doctrines of European socialism. Their commitment to socialism, how-
ever, was conditioned by a deeper commitment to a pragmatic and exis-
tential conception of the nature of reality and history. From the philoso-
pher Iohn Dewey, they had learned that knowledge was essentially
experimental and that truth was to be realized in practice. As a tech-
nique of inquiry, Dewey's philosophy of "instrumentalism" liberated
American thought from abstraction and contemplation, malting the in-
tellect not a talent to be admired, but a tool to be applied to social
problems. Yet Dewey's faith in scientific intelligence and empirical
methodology seemed to drain human thought of its emotional currents.
Far more congenial to the poetically minded Left intellectuals was the

21 John Dewey about the time

of his invitation by the Soviet
Union to help set up a public
school system there.

X
22 Pragmatic philosopher Wil-
liam James, whose vision of an "un-
finished" reality was particularly
congenial to the intellectuals of the
Lyrical Left.

thought of William James, a pragmatic philosopher with an existential

temperament, a "mystic in love with life," as George Santayana re-
marked, and one who knew the meaning of "alienation" long before the
term became a boring cliché.
No one agonized more over the problem of knowledge and reality
than did the young James. In his early years he was struck by a "fear of
my own existence" that felt like "a horrible dread at the pit of my stom-
ach." A psychologist interested in the soul and spirit, James later over-
came his morbid depression by turning to the mysterious powers of be-
lief. He also brought all abstract philosophical issues together under the
immediate phenomenon of "experience": the world may be without
ultimate metaphysical meaning, and man may be a creature without
ultimate essence; yet in experiencing the world, in the process of ex-
panding his consciousness, man can impose meaning upon it and there-
by create his own essence. What counted was will, purpose, and effort.
Thus James made the emotions a source of energy that could influence
objective reality. He advised a group of Harvard students: "Believe that
life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact." James's
philosophy enabled the alienated intellectual to overcome scientific
skepticism and moral paralysis, for life could now be conceived as an
"adventure" that involved "passionate decisions" and even a "leap" to
faith. After James's classic essay, "The Will to Believe" (1896), it was no
longer necessary to struggle over hair-splitting metaphysical squabbles
like determinism, for reality was essentially "unfinished" and man was
as free as he chose and "willed" to be. Although James was far from a 35
 politically minded philosopher, the implications of his thought were
profoundly radical- believe that the world can be changed, and your be-
lief will help change it.6
For the upper-class intelligentsia Dewey and James played an impor-
tant role in making intellectual radicalism possible. Their world view
eliminated a closed, rational order, a harmonious system in which man
must find his proper place in the structure of reality as ordained by God
or nature. Nor was history, as the determinists argued, a mere succes-
sion of events that proceeded along the plane of natural causation, inde-
pendent of the desires and will of man. On the contrary, reality was dy-
namic and unfolding, and man active and creative. It is this conception
of historical reality and human nature that Walling conveyed in The
Larger Aspects of Socialism (1913), where James's idea of poetic imagina-
tion and Dewey's idea of social experimentation are combined to present
Marxism as a creative adventure as well as a pragmatic science. Lipp-
mann and Eastman shared this view. Lippmann, a former student of
lames who admired Marx as a demanding thinker who "set the intellec-
tual standards of socialism on the most rigorous intellectual basis he
could find," defended Walling when he was criticized by LaMonte for
his pragmatic interpretation of Marxism. Lippmann was too skeptical a
thinker to accept either pragmatism or Marxism as flawless intellectual
propositions. But his brief commitment to socialism was characterized
by the Jarnesian imperative that one must believe in the historically
impossible to overcome the corrosive effects of critical doubt. To those
who drew upon history to show that socialism would only replace bour-
geois exploitation by proletarian domination, Lippmann replied: "That
may be true, but it is no reason for being bullied by it into a tame admis-
sion that what has always been must always be. I see no reason for exalt-
ing the unconscious failure of other revolutions into deliberate models
for the next one."7

The Task of Mind

One of the chief characteristics of the historical consciousness of the
first Left was its willingness to believe that what "has always been" can
be negated, that reality can be acted upon and transformed through
36 conscious human effort. What tended to set left-wing thinkers apart
from radical literary innovators like the poet Ezra Pound, or radical
disturbers of convention like the journalist H. L. Mencken, was the
conviction that the world could be remade by carrying theoretical and
moral thought over into the field of practical action. Along with older
cultural pessimists like Henry Adarns and Mark Twain, the "New In-
tellectuals" of 1913 also felt estranged from the prevalent values of
American society; but whereas the morose historian and the brooding
novelist tried to find solace in a lost, mythical past, the younger radicals
believed their thoughts could be made useful in contemporary society.
Similarly, the Left felt itself linked with the literary bohemians by a
common hatred of bourgeois hypocrisy; but, whereas the artists tended
to limit themselves to contemplating and expressing esthetic ideas, the
Left insisted upon the political actualization of ideas. Finally, the Left
shared with the socialists a revulsion against capitalism; but, whereas
the "scientific socialists" awaited the unfolding of the objective "laws"
of economics, the young rebels were convinced that truth was not so
much found or discovered but created and made actual.
All these tendencies fructified in the brilliant mind of Max Eastman,
the poet-philosopher of the Lyrical Left. Significantly, liberals and
reformers were Eastman's favorite targets. Liberals were "soft-headed
idealists" who believed in the virtue of nationalism and the efficacy of
class cooperation. Accepting pragmatism but rejecting Marxism, liber-
als used their "minds to mitigate the subjective impact of unpleasant
facts instead of defining the facts with a view to drastic action." Spe-
cifically, liberals ruled out the "drastic" weapon of working-class
struggle:

Between revolutionist and reformer there is . . . a flat contradiction of

wish, belief, and action. The reformer wishes to procure for the workers
their share of the blessings of civilization; he believes in himself and his
altruistic oratory; he tries to multiply his kind. The revolutionist wishes the
workers to take their blessings of civilization; he believes in them and their
organized power; he tries to increase in them the knowledge of their situa-
tion and the spirit of class conscious aggression!

Eastman criticized liberals for trying to "mitigate" and "blur" the exis-
tence of class conflict, for idealizing the real instead of realizing the
ideal, for interpreting existing conditions instead of drastically chang- 37
 ing those conditions through the will to believe and the will to act.
Putting Marx's notion of "praxis" into verse, Eastman expressed elo-
quently the idea of negation:

Mind's task is not to blur the real

With mimic tints from an ideal
But to change one into another by an act.9
Arising as an opposition to liberalism and conservatism, possessing
the will to negate reality, perceiving itself as a new generation with a
new historical consciousness of freedom and possibility, the first Left
of the twentieth century set out to conquer the world armed, not with a
systematic ideology, but with a vague strategy of class conflict and
working-class struggle. This strategy confronted the Lyrical Left with a
problem that would continue to confound every American Left in the
twentieth century-the problem of the proletariat.
Notes
l Henry James, ed., The Letters of William lames (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1920),
Vol. II, pp. 100-01.
2 The rise of student radicalism in the 1960's rekindled the debate over young
intellectuals that had been first broached by Marxists in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. See Lewis S. Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals: A Set of Post-Ideological Essays
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 53-69; and Shlomo Avineri, "Feuer on
Marx and the Intellectuals," Survey: A Iournal of Soviet and East European Studies,
no. 62 (Jan., 1967), 152-55.
3 Paul Lafargue, "Socialism and the Inte1lectuals," The International Socialist Re-
view, I (Aug. l, 1900), 84-101; Paul Buhle, "intellectuals in the Debsian Socialist
Party," Radical America, IV (Apr., I970), 35-58; Lew Feuer, "The Political
Linguistics of 'Intellectual,' 1898-l918," Survey, no. 78 (Winter, 1971), 156-83.
4)ean Jaurés and Paul Lafargue, Idéalisme et ma térialisme dans la conception de
Fliiszoire (Toulouse, 1895); Charles B. Mitchell/' Bergsonism and Practical Ideal-
ism," New Review, II (Apr., 1914), 224-27.
5 Robert Rives LaMonte, "The New Intellectuals," New Review, II (Ian., 1914), 35-53.
6William lames, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, 1902),
157; id., Pragmatism and Other Essays (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963),
PP. 187-213.
7 Willialn English Walling, "The Pragmatism of Marx and Engels," New Review, I
(Apr. 5, 1913), 434-39; ibid. (Apr. 12, 1913), 464-69; Walter Lippinann, "LaMonte,
Walling and Pragrnatisrn," New Review, I (Nov., 1913), 907-09; id., A Freface tO
Politics (New York: Charles Kennelly, 1913) pp. 282, 303.
8 Max Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, IV (Dec., 1912), 1.
91i/lax Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (New York: Universal
38 Library, 1955), p. 57.
 I

Strangers in the Land <

The Proletariat
and Marxism

Morally and spiritually I was sickened. I

remembered my intellectuals and idealists,
my unfrocked preachers, broken professors,
and clean-minded class-conseious working-
men, ... a spiritual paradise of unselfish and
ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever
blazing and burning the Holy Grail. So I
went back to the working class.
Jack London, 1907

Whatever its social or psychological origins, the modern intellectual's

fascination with the working class derives in large part from the doc-
trines and ideas of Karl Marx. Marx saw the laboring masses as the
vehicle of social transformation because they possessed the sheer weight
of numbers, felt the economic crises more acutely than other classes,
and were strategically located in the industrial system. Moreover, it was
not the intellectuals, but the proletariat that was destined to liberate
mankind: philosophers only interpret the world, the proletariat can
change it. In Marx's theory of knowledge, to think is to act, and to work
and produce is to know the world by laboring upon it and transforming
it. Glorifying work as an activity higher than thought itself, Marx came
close to believing that the proletariat would be able to grasp "the self- 39
awareness adumbrated in the speculations of the philosophers."1 As
the agency of historical consciousness, the proletariat would fulfill its
predetermined mission by struggling to emancipate man from capitalist
domination, peacefully if possible, violently if necessary.
This chapter is concerned with two questions: Why did the first
American Left of the twentieth century fail to find a true revolutionary
proletariat in the organized farmer and labor movements? Why did that
Left reject the nineteenth-century tradition of American radicalism and
turn to Marxism as the true revolutionary ideology?

FARMERS AND INDUSTRIAL WORKERS

In the opening years of the twentieth century the United States was still
primarily an agricultural country. Neither backward nor underde-
veloped, rural America did not have the volatile peasantry and agrarian
anarchism that characterized many countries with revolutionary tra-
ditions or tendencies. Yet, toward the end of the nineteenth century
the most exciting and powerful expression of radical protest in America
came from the farmers' populist movement. Populisrn had its origins in

23 Karl Marx and his

daughter Jenny at about the
time of the first publication
of his seminal Capital.
the sporadic discontent of western and southern growers who began to
see themselves as victims of landlords and of exploitation by wealthy
interests. Caught between the familiar squeeze of declining commodity
prices and rising farm costs, gouged by inequitable rail rates, and
harassed by eastern creditors and bankers, the growers struck back by
organizing one of the roost aggressive political movements of the late
nineteenth century. In the early nineties the populist Peoples' Party
could control or influence a dozen state legislatures and claim four
senators and over fifty congressmen. The programs it advocated made
it appear a radical force of the Left. Populists demanded government
ownership or regulation of railroads and telegraph systems, lower
tariffs, a graduated income tax, control of monopolies, direct election of
senators, and low-interest government loans to farmers. Radical pro-
posals of this sort shook the conservative classes everywhere. When the
eloquent William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1896 and adopted parts of the populist platform, the
urban press headlined prophecies of doom.
Since populism antagonized the industrialists, it aroused the imagi-
nation of many young radicals. Several prominent American socialists
passed through a populist phase on their way to Marxism; the title of
the autobiography of communist William Z. Foster-Frorn Bryan to
Stalin-reflects this. Yet serious ideological differences existed between
populism and socialism. Populists rightly stressed the dangers of con-
centrated industrial power, but Marxists regarded the farmers' single-
minded attacks upon the trusts as a misreading of history. Most Marx-
ists accepted industrial centralization as inevitable and progressive,
since business growth and consolidation would produce more industrial
workers and tend to drive out the petit entrepreneur, thereby swelling
the ranks of the proletariat and setting the stage for revolution. Social
and ethnic issues also separated radical intellectuals from populists.
Left intellectuals were at home in the cosmopolitan life of the city,
whereas southern and western farmers feared the city as alien, para-
sitical, and subversive to the traditional institutions of family and
religion. Although populist leaders cooperated with labor in a few
states, and even won the support of the "Colored Alliance," an organiza-
tion of black field workers in the South, they displayed little under- 41
24 Early populism and agrarian radicalism in America. A meeting of The Grange in Scott
County, Illinois, in the late- nineteenih century.

standing of the needs of urban workers and the aspirations of im-

migrants. Populist monetary policy also alienated the radical Left.
Convinced that money was power, populists advocated easy credit and
the free coinage of silver in order to alleviate the burden of debts and to
challenge the gold standard of eastern bankers. To the socialist Left such
programs merely confused the symptom and the cause by equating the
"curse of gold" with the crime of capitalism.
The limitations of agrarian radicalism as a potential component of
the Left can better be seen in the "contradictions" of populism. Popu-
list leaders desired to destroy the national banking system but preserve
local state banks; they attacked industrial property but not private
property; they demanded government control of railroads and monopo-
lies but stopped far short of calling for the nationalization of the means
of production, which would include the sacrosanct farm itself. Popu-
lists and socialists did tend to have a common vocabulary and common
targets. Populists matched the Marxist theory of "surplus value" with
their own notion of the "labor-cost theory of wealth," thereby juxta-
posing the real "producing classes" against the corporate "interests."
42 Yet the populist appeal to the dignity and justice of human toil scarcely
 25 Populist William Jennings Bryan at the 1912 Democratic Conven-
tion.

echoed Marx's hope of doing away with the "alienated labor" that he
saw as a product of capitalism, although one recent historian has main-
tained that it did.2 Actually populist values sprang from a traditional
Protestant ethic that made hard, honest work the expression of high
moral character. Indeed, the influence of that conservative ethic could
be seen in the fact that farmers frequently attacked socialism as well as
industrial capitalism. Socialism threatened "the love of title deeds to
home [which] is inbred among the people," stated one midwesterner.
Hence socialism "inevitably destroys all independence of individual
action and love of country." Committed to individualism and patriot-
ism, many populists shared the fundamental premises of American capi-
talism: the "sacredness" of property, the value of opportunity, and the vir-
tue of work. "Socialism would only replace one master by another, the
monopolist by the community," declared a journal of the western
populists. "All the systems of anarchy and socialism are based upon a
supposed quality innate in man which history from the earliest mo-
ment of his existence has disproved." Moving from the lessons of his-
tory to the principles of psychology, the journal raised the most trou-
bling question of all: "Without individual competition and rivalry 43
 what is there to emulate? The answer must inevitably be nothing."3 1

Young radicals who had read Veblen's sociology of rural life knew
what the populists wanted to "emulate." For populism ultimately be-
trayed a love-hate relationship with capitalism wherein the "interests"
of Wall Street were opposed in order that the "higher interests" of Main
Street might prevail. The acid test was Marxism, and the "inflexible
reluctance" of the Midwest to tolerate "Marxian ideas," stated the Lyri-
cal literary intellectual Randolph Bourne, revealed "its robust resis-
.
tance to . . self knowledge."4 Steeped in Jeffersonian individualism
and Protestant morality, populism could attack capitalism politically
but never transcend it intellectually. Since its leitmotif was restoration
rather than revolution, populism waxed and waned with the rise and
decline of economic grievances.
The Lyrical Left never placed much hope in the farmers, but the fail-
ure of industrial workers to produce a radical proletariat raises a ques-
tion that has troubled radicals and scholars since the turn of the
century: Why is the American worldng class so conservative? If this
question could be answered we might better understand why socialism
failed in the United States and why the life of each Left has been so
feeble and short.
Several answers have been suggested: the existence of the American
frontier, which, while it may not have offered a safety valve to the
propertyless workers in eastern cities, did keep the labor supply limited
(and unemployment low) by slowing the growth of urban populations;
America's advanced economic development and national income,
which, while grossly maldistributed, enabled Americans to enjoy
relative prosperity long before most Europeans; the American labor
force, which, while perhaps materially no better off than German
workers before the First World War, was characterized by the ethnic
heterogeneity of immigrant groups, a factor that hindered development
of class identity and promoted the desire of their descendants to exceed
the status of their parents and prove themselves "respectable" Ameri-
cans; and, finally, the fluid nature of America's social structure, which,
while not offering a universal "rags to riches" ladder to success, may
have offered meaningful low-level mobility. The factor of upward
44 social mobility is crucial, and although the paucity of historical data
makes it hazardous to generalize about working-class attitudes, curios-
ity impels us to speculate. If American workers believed in the cap-
italist ideology of opportunity and mobility, did those who failed to
rise see the cause of their failure as personal inadequacy rather than
social inequity and thereby suffer guilt and self-deprecation? On the
other hand, if workers remained skeptical of the ideology, why did
they fail to develop a radical class consciousness as a means of penetrat-
ing the deception? Or were economic opportunity and occupational
mobility not myth, but in some measure plausible reality? However
these questions will be answered by further research, one fact seems
incontestable' the American working class was far from experiencing
what Marx called the "increasing misery" of the proletariat-and no
one was more aware of this fact than Samuel Gompers.5
As President of the American Federation of Labor, Gompers was the
bane of the Left. Earlier in the nineteenth century the American labor
movement had seemed to offer a radical alternative to the status quo.
The militant Knights of Labor, an idealistic fraternity of toilers orga-
nized after the Civil War, attempted to forge the unity of all who
labored-black and white, women and children, the skilled and un-

26 Samuel Gompers, whose

advocacy of immediate and
limited material goals as
early leader of American
trade unionism was bitterly
opposed by the socialists.

.......
 skilled. This experiment in working-class solidarity soon petered out,
and by the end of the century the AFL dominated the labor movement in
the United States. Under Gompers' powerful leadership, the AFL con-
centrated on organizing skilled workers, and its membership grew in-
creasingly elitist and exclusive. In contrast to the Knights' comprehen-
sive reform unionism, the AFL's "pure and simple" trade unionism
aimed not so much to liberate man by humanizing the work process,
but to secure greater economic gains from management. To machinists,
shoemakers, typesetters, and hard-working craftsmen living on the edge
of survival, a wage increase was a godsend. But to the left-wing in-
tellectuals, the AFL offered no ideological challenge to capitalism other
than demanding more of its profits so that workers could purchase more
of its products. Gompersism, as George Bernard Shaw said of trade
unionism, was the capitalism of the proletariat.
American socialists attempted to challenge Gompers' leadership. But
a key to the weakness of that challenge may be seen in the famous de-
bate in 1914 between Gompers and Morris Hillquit. A Latvian immi-
grant, Hillquit became one of the chief spokesmen for the philosophy of
socialism in America. A leading popularizer of Marxism, he effectively
answered the attacks by critics who feared collective ownership as a
threat to individual liberty. Yet in his debate with Gompers, Hillquit
was reluctant to define an "end" or "ultimate goal" of socialism other
than to say that socialists' demands went "further" and "higher" than
those of the AFL. The basic difference between socialism and trade
unionism was, Hillquit admitted, "a quantitative one-that the Social-
ist Party wants more than the American Federation of Labor."6 Such a
formulation had serious limitations. Without an enduring ideal toward
which labor must struggle, without a theoretical vision that would
guide everyday decisions, it was difficult for socialists to check practice
against theory and even more difficult for workers to know how to dis-
tinguish the "quantitative" promises of socialism from those of cap-
italism.
Hillquit aside, other socialist intellectuals did hold out for inviolable
ideals regardless of the possibility of their realization. In this respect,
Gompers may have possessed a better "materialist" grasp of historical
46 forces than even sophisticated Marxists like Daniel DeLeon. Shunning
all vague ideals, Gompers believed that "only the concrete and the im-
mediate were material"-higher wages, shorter hours, better working
conditions. As Theodore Draper has shrewdly observed: "Whatever
success Gompers had, and the Socialists did not have, was scarcely a
repudiation of the Marxist emphasis on material interests. It might have
indicated the need for American Marxists to take their materialism a
little more materialistically."7 There lay one predicament confronting
intellectual radicals: to meet the immediate, material needs of the
American working class they ran the risk of settling for less than social-
ism, which is not so much a demand for "more" as a demand for the
humanization of life. Yet the obverse is also true: as long as the socialist~
labor dialogue confined itself to material matters, capitalist values
would prevail. For a subtle change would take place in America that the
Left had not fully anticipated: As Veblen perceived at the time, the
United States would pass from a society of producers to a society of
buyers and spenders in which the impulse toward "conspicuous con-
sumption" could possibly influence even the working class. Unable to
find satisfaction in routine production, the American worker could

27 Morris I-Iillquit, socialist

I spokesman who challenged the
=
I
! Gompers view of the '
|

s trade uniordsm in America.

 very well assume that he would find it in burgeoning consumption.
Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) presented Marxism
with a paradox: the United States was a society with a class structure
but without any decisive conflict over the very materialistic values that
kept the structure intact. For the pervasive "pecuniary canons of taste"
would beguile the working class into believing that man finds his
fullest happiness not in productive effort but in grasping for the ma-
terial symbols of status and achievement, for articles like clean and
expensive clothing, which show that the wearer does not engage in
manual labor. (The fashionable corset, Veblen observed, rendered
women physically unfit for work.) As capitalism held out the promise
of more and more material goods, American workers could mistake the
abolition of scarcity for the abolition of capitalism. Since the boosters
of capitalism could claim to have brought about the miracles of
abundance, there was danger that America's "proletariat" would accept
the ruling class's power and values.
One problem facing the American Left, then, was the problem of
consciousness. The fact that a broad class consciousness would emerge
in the working class was an article of faith to most Marxist socialists.
Gompers had an answer to this eternal dream of the Left. "I told
[the socialists] that the Klassen Bewusztsein [class consciousness] of
which they made so much was not either a fundamental or inherent
element, for class consciousness was a mental process shared by all who
had imagination." The real sense of workers' solidarity, argued Gom-
pers, was "that primitive force that had its origins in experience only,"
the gut-emotion of "class feeling" that developed among organized
workers who had a common stake in their craft and position. By a
strange coincidence Gompers arrived at somewhat the same conclusion
Lenin had been propounding in his struggle with his Russian oppo-
nents. Lenin, too, maintained that no inherent quality of "socialist con-
sciousness," no revolutionary vision of "what must be done," resided in
the workers. Like Gompers, Lenin believed that class consciousness
could be appreciated and nurtured only by those capable of understand-
ing "philosophical, historical, and economic theories. . . ." But where
Gompers obviously accepted the "primitive force" of "class feeling,"
48 Lenin believed socialist theorists must wage a strenuous "struggle with
 4

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elementariness" and combat the workers' tendency toward either

acquiescence or blind, rebellious "spontaneity" that would not lead
to coherent revolutionary action. Since workers on their own would
develop only a "trade union consciousness," the task of instilling true
class consciousness was the unique function of the intellectuals.8

THE UTOPIAN TRADITION

Lenin was not the first to demonstrate the role of the intellectual in the
reformation of society. Indeed, in the mid-nineteenth century Friedrich
Engels, colleague of Karl Marx, thought he had discovered "the existing 49
 .
29 Charles Fourier, French so-
cialist whose American disciples
generally accepted his utopian ... ....

ideas but shunned the pansexu-

al aspects of his doctrine.

practice of communism" in various American communities like the

"one at Brook Farm, Massachusetts, where fifty members and thirty
pupils live on about 200 acres, and have founded a distinguished school
under the leadership of a Unitarian preacher, C. Ripley."9
In the l830's and 1840's America spawned a number of small socialist
communes-early experiments in what a later generation would call
"countercultures." The utopian colonies were headed by an odd mix-
ture of spiritualists and sensualists: Christian communists like the
Shaker Mother Ann, who called upon her followers to withdraw from
the polluted world of the flesh and practice celibacy in order to prepare
for the Day of Judgment; secular communists like John Humphrey
Noyes, who advocated the "complex marriage" system of free love in
order to realize the laws of physical and spiritual nature. Many in-
tellectuals and utopians believed, with the French socialist Charles
Fourier, that modern society had distorted original human nature.
Emerson, an admirer of Fourier, best described the fragmentation of the
self: "The state of society is one in which the members have suffered
50 amputation from the trunk, and strut about as so many walking mon-
stems,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."
Fourier's solution was to liberate the "passions" in order to allow the
natural force of "attraction" to govern human behavior. Thus, since
man is as attracted to different objects of desire as he is to different ob-
jects of labor, he should be tied down to neither the delight of a single
woman nor the drudgery of a single job. Although Fourier's American
followers (the Associationists) shied away from his pansexualism,
utopians like George Ripley believed that the release of passion "will
call forth, as from a well-tuned instrument, all those exquisite modula-
tions of feeling and intellect, which were aptly termed by Plato, the
'music of his being."'10
Pre-Civil War utopian socialism elicited the enthusiastic response
of many intellectuals, and it influenced a wide variety of campaigns for
educational reform, women's rights, pacifism, and the abolition of
slavery. Significantly, the romantic utopians were the first generation
of American intellectuals to try to integrate socialism with culture, to
unify the life of work with the life of mind, and, in Ripley's words,
"insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor
than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as pos-
sible, in the same individual." Utopians as well as Transcendentalists
believed that only when this fusion of culture and social regeneration
took place could man become truly conscious of his essence and realize
what Emerson called "a perfect unfolding of individual nature." The
first issue of Brook Farm's The Harbinger passionately stated this theme.
After discussing literature, painting, music, sculpture, architecture,
drama, "and all arts which seek the Good, by way of the Beautiful,"
the editorial concluded:
We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion,
no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the
cause of the oppressed, the down-trodden, the insulted and injured masses
of our fellow men. Every pulsation of our being vibrates in sympathy with
the wrongs of the toiling millions, and every wise effort for their speedy
enfranchisement will find in us resolute and indomitable advocates. If any
imagine from the literary tone of the preceding remarks, that we are indif-
ferent to the radical movement for the benefit of the masses, which is the
crowning glory of the nineteenth century, they will soon discover their
egregious mistake. To that movement, consecrated by religious principle, 51
 sustained by an awful sense of justice, and cheered by the brightest hopes of
future good, all our powers, talents, and attainments are devoted. We look
for an audience among the refined and educated circles, to which the char-
acter of our paper will win way; but we shall also be read by the swart and
sweaty artisan; the laborer will find in us another champion; and many
hearts, struggling with the secret hope which no weight or care and toil
can entirely suppress, will pour on us their benedictions as we labor for
the equal rights of All.11

The utopian impulse also infused the writings of late nineteenth-

century thinkers. In Henry George's Progress and Poverty, Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward, and William Dean Howells' A Traveler
from Altruria, Americans could find schemes for redistributing non-
productive wealth (unearned income) and visions of a future world
of social felicity. Together with muckraking journalists and progressive
scholars, utopian novelists subjected America to a ferment of social
criticism that effectively exposed the injustices of capitalism and the
power of the business class. Moreover, unlike the populists and trade
unionists, the utopians consciously sought to alter the conditions of
work and the quality of life. Nevertheless, despite its humane impulses
and enormous popularity, the whole tradition of utopian socialism
seemed inadequate to most radicals of the twentieth century.
As models of social conscience, the pre-Civil War utopian communes
offered a mirror of self-criticism and a mechanism of escape. But as
movements for social change, they produced little of enduring value.
Looking back, later generations of radicals would claim that the
romantic communitarians failed because they lacked an understanding
of economics and a commitment to politics. Setting up fragile enclaves
in a brave but innocent attempt to escape the grasping paws of society,
utopians assumed they could insulate their communities from the
ubiquitous pressures of capitalism. Shunning institutions such as
political parties, labor organizations, the law, the church, and the
professions, they disengaged themselves from political life. I-Iopelessly
naive about the nature of power ("power ceases in the instant of re-
pose"-Emerson), the Transcendentalists in particular appeared to be
formulating useless esthetic solutions to pressing social problems.
Late-nineteenth-century utopians also seemed to have no grasp of
52 economic realities. Approaching socialism as an ethical force, the in-
1 - I - " - '

30 and 31 William Dean Howells (left) and Edward Bellamy (right), influential
turn-of-the-century novelists who advocated cooperative community but rejected
"foreign" socialism.

evitable result of moral progress, many utopians believed they could

solicit from men of power the funds with which to build pastures of co-
operation within a jungle of competition. Moreover, the utopians had
no direct ties to the unorganized and unskilled workers. Though deeply
moved by the plight of industrial workers, novelists like Bellamy and
Howells were more concerned with the devastating impact of competi-
tive capitalism upon traditional values. Both writers wanted to replace
rampant individualism with some version of the cooperative commu-
nity, and also to keep the virtues of the country safe from corruption by
a "foreign" socialism that, in Bellamy's telling words, "smells to the
average American of petroleum, suggests the red flag, and all manner
of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion, which
in this country we at least treat with decent respect." This concern for
the moral health of the traditional American character linked the two
(pre~ and post-Civil War) generations of utopian socialists. Defending
Fourierism, the journalist Horace Greeley spoke of the need for "educa-
tion and training," which will lead men to the habits of "Industry,
Virtue, Self-Respect, instead of those which naturally lead to Idleness,
Dissipation, Vice and Debasement." The politics of middle-class self-
preservation, utopian socialism was an attempt to reform the circum-
stances of economic life in order better to affirm the principles of moral
life. Humane, civilized, sincere, genteel, proper, and upright, reform
socialism appeared to younger radicals to be the false consciousness of
the "starched collar" class.12 53
 Few members of the Left could find an inspiring political vision in
traditional nineteenth-century liberalism and radicalism. Organized
farmers and industrial workers never constituted a revolutionary
proletariat; utopians never questioned the sanctity of private property;
liberals never took up the strategy of class struggle; and humanitarian
reformers could never transcend a genteel legacy of polite idealism. Yet
there remained one doctrine that supposedly would will all these needs -
Marxism.

THE MARXIST BACKGROUND

The doctrines of Marx were first brought to America by immigrants
who fled Germany after the ill-fated uprisings of 1848. Steeped in the
problems of class consciousness, German-American Marxists like
Ioseph Weydemeyer and Friedrich Sorge opposed utopianism as an idle
dream completely out of touch with immigrant and proletarian life.
The German leaders also organized American branches of the Inter-
national Workingmen's Association, the First International, which was
established in London with the support of Karl Marx. A second genera-
tion of German immigrants brought with them the ideas of the founder
of German social democracy, Ferdinand Lassalle. Later in the century,
as successive waves of Italian, Jewish, and east European immigrants
arrived, and the labor struggle in the United States grew more intense,
American socialism took on a variety of expressions, including an-
archism and syndicalism. These groups divided not over the goal of
socialism but over how to achieve it.
Drastically reduced, the arguments revolved around three issues. The
first was the argument over politics versus economics. Although posi-
tions were never clear and consistent, in general the Lassalleans
believed workers and intellectuals must win over the state through
political activity. The Marxists, in contrast, maintained that economic
struggle through union organization took precedence over electoral
politics.
The second issue, involving the pace and nature of historical change,
divided the gradualists from the extremists. The right-wing socialists
believed the goals of Marx could be realized step-by-step through piece-
54 meal changes, while the left wing held out for an almost apocalyptic
32 and 33 Ferdinand Las
Salle (right), founder of Ger
man social democracy, whose
ideas were brought to Amer
` in the late-nineteenth
century by the second wave
German imznigrants
Marxist doctrine had arrived
with the first wave mid
century. (below) A member- *
ship card in the American I
branch of the International
Working Men's Association
founded by its German lead
Karl Marx's signature
corresponding secretary l
for the German branch may
be seen second from the bot
tom on the left

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34 Victor Berger, leader of the

right wing of the Socialist Party
in the controversy over how to
establish socialism in America.

leap to socialism. Hence the left wing castigated the palliative reforms
sponsored by progressives, claiming that socialism could not be legis-
lated into existence until capitalism was abolished. Similarly, on the
issue of trade unionism, the left wing advocated setting up organiza-
tions to rival established unions, even though the tactic of "dual
unionism" jeopardized efforts at unifying the labor movement, and the
right wing advocated entering established unions and "boring from
within" in order to educate the workers to socialism. The chief theoreti-
cal spokesman for the left wing was Daniel DeLeon, who was dubbed an
"impossibiliste" by his opponents because of his scorn for immediate
programs. The chief practical spokesman for the right wing was Victor
Berger, the first American socialist elected to Congress. Their dis-
agreements represented something of a pale repetition of the intense
dialogue over "orthodoxy" versus "revisionism" that had occupied the
international socialist movement in Europe. DeLeon adhered to the
56 traditional version of class struggle and the triumph of the proletariat,
while Berger tried to adapt Marxist principles to American conditions.
One saw the birth of socialism in the revolutionary power of the
workers, the other in the evolutionary reforms of the government.
Moderates accused DeLeon of indulging in revolutionary fantasy, while
militants accused Berger of subscribing to an evolutionary fallacy.
The third dispute among socialists arose over the use of violence.
Contrary to the myth of peaceful and orderly progress, the United States
had been the scene of one of the most ravaging social struggles in the
western world. Between 1881 and 1906 there occurred some 30,000
strikes and lockouts, affecting almost 200,000 businesses and over 9%
million workers. From the coal mines of Pennsylvania, where Irish
Molly Maguires would methodically murder the management's police
spies, to the mine fields of Colorado, where management hired state
authorities to terrorize and lynch migrant coal workers, class warfare
became a daily reality. After Chicago's famous Haymarket Riot of 1886
socialists disagreed sharply over the tactic of violence. Violence was
associated with the idea of anarchism, a simple and yet complex doc-
trine opposed to all forms of authority and coercion, what Max Nomad
has called an elusive "political daydream" of total statelessness and

35 Eleven men, described in a contemporary news account as "the last of the Molly Ma-
guires," march to their execution at Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1877.
 classlessness. Psychologically as well as politically, anarch
ist terrorism
reflected the utter hopelessness and desperation of the disinh
erited. By
the time of the First World War six chiefs of state had been
assassinated
in the name of anarchism, including in America, Presid
ent William
McKinley.
There were thousands of anarchists among the Italian-Amer
ican
followers of Enrico Malatesta and the German-American
disciples of
Johann Most. What troubled the American labor movem
ent, however,
was not the sporadic deeds of violence by isolated foreign terroris
ts, but
the sustained doctrine of class warfare of the Industrial Worke
rs of the
World. The IWW sprouted in the western states mainl
y among unor-
ganized, seminomadic lumbering and miners.
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37 A sympathy demon-
stration for Wobbly agi-
tator Carlo Tresca, on
trial at the time (1916) for
syndicalist activity.

were called, were tough, boisterous, and defiant. Appropriately, their

songs have become part of the idiom of radical folk music, their
courageous exploits legendary in the annals of the American Left. A
grand brotherhood of drifting hoboes and daring heroes, the Wobblies
had more than their share of political martyrs: Wesley Everest, a North-
western lumberman riddled with bullets by the American Legion after
one true patriot castrated him; Carlo Tresca, a colorful agitator gunned
down by an unknown political assassin; Joe Hill, a Utah construction
worker arrested on a spurious murder charge, who exclaimed while
facing a firing squad, "Don't mourn for rrle. Organize!" Occasionally
the IWW organized as many as 30,000 workers; and, in 1912, during the
height of its fame, won a dramatic, long-fought textile strike in Law-
renee, Massachusetts. The Wobblies believed in syndicalism, originally
a French doctrine that held that completely autonomous workers'
unions (or syndicates) could lead the masses to socialism. Because of
their great faith in the spontaneous, creative character of the proletariat, 59
 syndicalists were often at odds with Marxists, who had less faith in the
untutored political consciousness of the workers.
What disturbed American socialists was not so much the European
issue of "spontaneity" versus "consciousness" as the tactics employed by
the IWW. The tactics were a variation on the anarcho~syndicalist theme
of "propaganda by the deed": "direct action," "sabotage/' and the magic
of the "general strike," which supposedly would bring down all author-
ity in a single blow. Yet the Wobblies' use of violence has been greatly
exaggerated. Wobblies were convinced that power comes from the barrel
of a gun, but they also knew that the ruling class possessed more guns.
Although they occasionally resorted to Winchester rifles or dynamite
sticks to defend themselves or to retaliate, seldom did Wobblies as an
organization use violence as a strategic weapon, and rarely did their
leaders really believe-as opposed to the rhetorical bombast of their
declarations-that violence alone could lead to power. "I, for one,"
Wobbly leader Bill Haywood remarked during the Lawrence strike,
"have turned my back on violence. It wins nothing. When we strike
now, we strike with our hands in our pockets. . . . Pure strength lies in
the overwhelming power of numbers."13 Nevertheless, the issue was
fiercely debated at various socialist conferences; and in 1912 the rising
tension between the socialists and the syndicalists came to a head when
the Socialist Party amended its constitution to prohibit the use of "sab-
otage." The repudiation of violence made socialism more respectable,
but the expulsion of the IWW from the SP made Wobblyism more
attractive to the Left in its fight against respectability.
Despite the factionalism, socialism grew rapidly after the turn of the
century. In 1901 the newly formed Socialist Party broadened the base of
the movement under the inspiring leadership of Eugene Debs. Between
1902 and 1912 the SP's membership grew from 10,000 to 118,000, and its
electoral power from 95,000 to the nearly 900,000 votes that Debs
gathered as presidential candidate in 1912. During this period it could
claim one congressman, 56 mayors, 160 councilmen, and 145 aldermen.
The socialist press in America circulated 5 English and 8 foreign-lan-
guage dailies, 262 English and 36 foreign-language weelclies, and 10
English and 2 foreign-language monthlies. Several developments
60 account for the dramatic rise of American socialism during its "golden
 W .. If
A
W/W

Poem Han unlunnown Proletarian

Music by RudolphWmLibbido f-

Pub-by l'W~\\F Educational Bureau

bdlé 21-5-A
38 Cover of sheet music distributed by the IWW in 1918.
39 and 40 (above) Wobbly leader Big Bill Haywood heads a parade in Lawrence, Massachu-
setts, in support of the crucial textile strike there. (below) Troops hold workers in check at a
demonstration during the strike.
years" (roughly 1902-1912): the absorption of populist elements,
particularly after 1910 when the SP reversed its 1908 resolution calling
for nationalization of farm land; the influx of immigrants and the SP's
policy of ethnic pluralism, which allowed Italians, Jews, Germans,
Poles, Hungarians, Slavs, Slovaks, and Finns to establish autonomous
branches; and the increasing prestige of European socialist parties, some
of which appeared to be on the verge of securing an absolute parlia-
mentary majority before the First World War.
Historians differ over when the SP began its decline. According to
lames Weinstein, the expulsion of the syndicalist Left in 1912 did not
impair the growth of socialism, which continued to win the political
vote of urban ethnic groups, radical intellectuals, and some middle-
class elements discontented with the Democratic and Republican par-
ties. As the research of John Laslett shows, however, the SP lost the
support of many important trade unionists like the brewery, shoe, gar-
ment, machinist, and mine workers, who began to align with the
Democratic party in support of the social and labor reforms of the
Wilson administration. 14 Whatever the reasons for the rise and decline
of American socialism, its history included some of the most towering
figures in twentieth-century American radicalism. Three deserve
special mention.

THREE LEADERS IN AMERICAN SOCIALISM

Dabs
Most magnetic was Eugene Debs. Straight from the Indiana heart-
land of America, lanky and bald, a forehead weighted with worry and
cheeks crinkled with laughter, Debs was the symbol of integrity. His
life history reads almost like a socialist morality tale. At work on the
railroads at the age of fifteen, he later gave up stoking locomotives to
organize the American Railway Union. In 1893 his union won a crucial
strike against James ]. Hill's powerful Great Northern Railroad; but
instead of following in Gompers' footsteps Debs then used his organiz-
ing talents to "eliminate the aristocracy of labor," to try to open up the
union movement to all workers. In his early years he had been deeply
stirred by the writings of Bellamy and George and later by the speeches 63
 Nu¢¢uq»qnaunuc¢¢nwaua

41 and 42 (above) A campaign poster for Eugene V. Debs and Ben Hanford, Social-
ist Party candiates for president and vice president, in 1904. (facing page) On the
campaign trail in 1904, Debs addresses a crowd at a railroad siding. During his 1920
campaign (conducted from a jail cell) he won almost a million votes.

of Bryan. He also read Marx while serving a prison term for his activi-
ties in the bloody Pullman strike of 1894. Debs often recalled the gov-
ernment's intervention in that strike as his conversion experience: "At
this juncture there were delivered, from wholly unexpected quarters,
a quick succession of blows that blinded me for an instant and then my
eyes opened-and in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every
rifle the class struggle revealed itself." Actually Debs' conversion to
socialism was much less melodramatic, for despite the Pullman experi-
ence he kept faith in democratic reforrnisrn until the populist debacle
of 1896. Thereafter he entered the SP and emerged as its titular head for
almost twenty years. As late as 1920, once again in jail, this time for
alleged antiwar propaganda, he drew nearly one million votes as the
SP's presidential candidate. Debs had the martyr's charisma, but he also
possessed tremendous oratorical power, a "sort of gusty rhetoric," wrote
Dos Passos, that made workers "want the world he wanted, a world
brothers might own where everybody would split even. . ." "His .
tongue," recalled Eastman, "would dwell upon a the or an and with a
kind of earnest affection for the humble that threw the whole rhythm of
his sentence out of conventional mold, and made each one seem a
special creation of the moment." Although Debs tried to remain above
ideological battles, occasionally he criticized the SP's two extreme
wings. Chiding "the spirit of bourgeois reform" on the Right, he insisted
that "voting for socialism is not socialism any more than a menu is a
mealor, opposing the saboteur rhetoric of the syndicalist Left, he main-
I

tained that "American workers are law-abiding and no amount of sneer-

ing or derision will alter the fact." Debs had his party enemies, but to
the Left in general he was a "poet," a "saint," the "sweetest strongman,"
and a "lover of manl<ind."15
DeLeo;r7

While Debs became the missionary of American socialism, Daniel

DeLeon became its metaphysician. DeLeon was an impressive figure.
His massive head with its piercing black eyes and carefully trimmed
white beard seemed precariously balanced on his short neck and nar- 65
 row shoulders. An educated scholar and masterful theoretician, he
seemed to carry the whole blueprint for revolution in his brain. After
the bolshevik uprising in 1917, the Lyrical radical Iohn Reed, back from
Russia, reportedly told his American comrades that Lenin was a "great
admirer of Daniel DeLeon" and regarded him as "the only one who had
added anything to socialist thought since Marx."16 Although the story
may be apocryphal,17 Lenin and DeLeon did have much in common.
Studying the same developments after the turn of the century, they
wrestled with similar problems: the strategy of party organization and
control of its press, the "bourgeoisification" of the workers, and the ef-
fect of imperialism on the coming revolution. As did Lenin, DeLeon
faced the crucial problem of the road to power. Should socialists over-
throw the existing order through the efficacy of the ballot (Lassalleans),
through the leadership of a mass party (Marxists), or through the eco-
nomic struggle of radical industrial unions (syndicalists)?
In theory DeLeon attempted a formulation that would reconcile all
sides: the SP would be voted peacefully into power, but once established
would liquidate itself and turn over the administration of the state to
the workers themselves-a foreshadowing of Lenin's State and Revolu-
tion. In practice, DeLeon was far to the Left of the Debsian socialists
and the reformists. Nothing was more repugnant to DeLeon than the
revisionist argument that "the movement is everything, the goal
nothing." A movement without a clearly defined goal could only secure
piecemeal reforms that would leave the structure of capitalist power
intact. DeLeon could tolerate economic reforms only if they were
accompanied by sustained revolutionary consciousness. What he feared
most was Gornpersism-the corruption of the working class by bour-
geois values and comforts. Ultimately he placed his faith in revolu-
tionary industrial unions that would educate workers and cultivate
their class consciousness. Organized like syndicates, the unions would
be led by a dedicated cadre.

In all revolutionary movements, as in the storming of fortresses, the thing

depends upon the head of the column-upon that minority that is so in-
tense in its convictions, so soundly based in its principles, so determined
in its actions, that it carries the masses with it, storms the breastworks and
66 captures the fort. 18
Haywood
DeLeon's finely spun theories made socialism appear as the perfec-
tion of an idea. The socialism of Big Bill Haywood, in contrast, sym-
bolized the beauty of deed and the power of action. Haywood cap-
tured the Lyrical Left's imagination, for he came as close as any radical
to embodying the proletarian-intellectual, a workingman whose mind
and conscience transcends his condition and thereby makes him
an articulate spokesman for those who labor with their hands. Hay-
wood was born in a boarding house in Salt Lake City in 1869. As a youth
he worked as a bellhop, a messenger boy, and an usher; by age fifteen
he was hefting a pick and shovel as a hardrock miner in Nevada, out-
fitted with "overalls, a jumper, a blue shirt, mining boots, two pairs
of blankets, a set of chessmen, boxing gloves and a big lunch of plum
pudding his mother fixed for him," wrote Dos Passos. Restless and foot-
loose, he wandered from town to town, working the mines by day and
sampling the saloons and brothels by night. He came to know the West
not as a land of opportunity but as a brutal terrain for class warfare in
which the conflict between labor and capital was irrepressible. In the
late nineties he joined the Western Federation of Miners and rose rapid-
ly as an effective union organizer and strike tactician. Shortly after-
wards he joined the IWW, and in 1905, during a protracted industrial
war in the Colorado coal fields, Haywood and two other union men
were kidnapped by Pinkerton agents and brought to Boise to be tried for
complicity in the murder of Governor Frank Staunnerberg of Idaho.
The entire labor movement came to their defense, and after the great
criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow won their acquittal, Haywood be-
came a national figure and a confirmed revolutionary. "Those of us who
are in jail," Haywood later wrote to fellow socialists, "those of us who
have been in jail-all of us who are willing to go to jail. . . . We are the
Revolution I" 19
A broad-shouldered man, over six feet tall, with a dark mat of hair
and a black patch over a maimed right eye, Haywood seemed the élan
vital of the wretched of the earth. The British socialist J. Ramsey
MacDonald perceived in him the embodiment of Sorel's revolutionary
will, "a bundle of primitive instincts, a master of direct statement. . . .
I saw him addressing a crowd in England, and there his crude appeals 67
 moved his listeners to wild applause. He made them see things, and
their hearts bounded to be up and doing."20 Haywood could move the
intellectual Left in much the same way, and when the SP adopted its
antisabotage resolution in 1912 and expelled Haywood the following
year, several radical intellectuals sided with "Comrade Haywood." By
that time Haywood himself had repudiated violence, but the actions of
the socialists indicated no understanding of the needs of helpless miners
and lumbermen who moved too often to become registered voters. Hay-
wood, the "Polyphemus from the raw mining camps of the West
[who] dedicated himself to the organization of the unskilled, the
poverty stricken and forgotten workers," symbolized the real poverty
and suffering that the intellectuals had never known. He also appealed
to the intelligentsia because he seemed to be a poet of .the proletariat,
the harbinger of a new socialist culture. In Max Eastman's novel Ven-
ture, Haywood addresses a salon of America's literati. After explaining
why there can be no art for the Pittsburgh steel worker, he expounds
the nature of a true working-class culture:

"Not only is art impossible to such a man," he said, "but life is impos-
sible. He does not live. He just works. He does the work that enables you to
live. He does the work that enables you to enjoy art, and to make it, and to
have a nice meeting like this and talk it over."
Bill used "nice" without irony: he meant it.
"The only problem, then, about proletarian art," he continued, "is how to
make it possible, how to make life possible to the proletariat. In solving that
problem we should be glad of your understanding, but we don't ask your
help. We are going to solve it at your expense. Since you have got life, and
we have got nothing but work, we are going to take our share of life away
from you, and put you to work."
" . . . When we stop fighting each other-for wages of erdstence on one
side, and for unnecessary luxury on the other-then perhaps we shall all
become human beings and surprise ourselves with the beautiful things we
do and make on the earth. Then perhaps there will be civilization and a
civilized art. But there is no use putting up pretense now. The important
thing . . . is that our side, the workers, should fight without mercy and win.
There is no home for humanity anywhere else."21

By and large American socialism was a movement not of, but on be-
68 half of the working class. Although it assumed to speak for the worker
and to articulate his needs, the doctrines and tactics had been developed
by intellectuals and party leaders. The Wobblies, the embodiment of a
working class that spoke for itself and struggled for its own class inter-
ests, gave the Left its opportunity to reconcile the aristocracy of intelli-
gence with the nobility of labor. Whereas the earlier Brook Farm
utopians hoped that the "swart and sweaty" laborers would rise to cul-
ture, the New Intellectuals of 1913 were willing to sit at the feet of
Haywood, the authentic voice of a genuine American proletariat, while
he expounded the creation of a new and superior culture by the working
class. Eastman's image of the Wobbly leader may have been more ro-
mantic than real, and likewise the Left's need to believe in a revolution-
ary proletariat may have been nurtured more by faith than by fact. As
the agency of historical transformation, as the ascending class that en-
ables the radical intellectual to maintain a dynamic contact with the
masses, the idea of the proletariat lives and dies in the mind of the Left.
Notes
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Raymond Aron, "The Myth of the Proletariat,"
in The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York: Norton, 1962), pp. 66-93.
2 Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America (New York: Norton,
1962), pp. 68-84.
3Jarnes B. Webster, "A I-*Iarmer's Criticism of the Socialist Party," The International
Socialist Review, II (May, 1902), 769-73; Howard H. Quint, The Forging of American
Socialism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 211.
4Thorstein Veblen, "The Independent Farmer," and "The Country Town," in The
Portable Veblen, ed. Max Lerner (New York: Viking, 1948), pp. 395-430; Randolph
Bourne, "A Mirror of the Middle West," in The History of a Literary Radical and
Other Papers (New York- S. A. Russell, 1956), p. 292.
5 George G. S. Murphy and Arnold Zell fer, "Sequential Growth, the Labor-Safety-
Valve Doctrine, and the Development of American Unionism," in Turner and the
Sociology of the Frontier, eds. Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset (New
York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 201-24; Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Move-
ment (New York: Macmillan, 1949) ; Stephen Thernstrorn, Poverty and Progress:
Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (New York: Atheneum, 1970); for an
example of the diverse conclusions reached by contcrnporary scholars studying the
mobility question, see Stephen Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth-
Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ.
Press, 1969).
6"I-Iillquit versus Gompers," in Socialism in America: From the Shakers to the Third
International: A Documentary History, ed. Albert Fried (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-
day, 1970), pp. 471-95.
7 Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism, (New York: Viking, 1963),
p. 29. 69
 8 Samuel Gompers, quoted in Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States
(Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), p. 43; V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?
(New York: International Publishers, 1929) .
9 Friedrich Engels, quoted in Lewis S. Feuer, "The Alienated Americans and Their
Influence on Marx and Engels," in Marx and the Intellectuals, p. 171.
ICI Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," in The Portable Emerson, ed.
Mark Van Doren (New York: Viking, 1946), p. 24; Charles Crowe, George Ripley.-
Transcendentalist and Utopian Socialist (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1967), p.
173.
11 The Harbinger editorial, in Fried, Socialism in America, pp. 161-65; see also John
L. Thomas, "Romantic Reform in America, 1815-1865," American Quarterly,
XVII (Winter, 1965), 656-81.
12Edward Bellamy, quoted in Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1951), p. 112; Horace Greeley, "Association Discussed" (1847), in Fried,
pp. 149-60; Max Eastman, "Concerning an Idealism," The Masses, IV (luly, 1913), 1.
Haywood, quoted in Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the
13 B111
Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), p. 161.
14]ames Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America 1912-1925 (New York:
Monthly Reviews, 1967); Iohn H. M. Laslett, Labor and the Left: A Stu 3/ of Socialist
and Radical Influences on the American Labor Movement, 1881-1 4 (New York:
Basic Books, 1970).
15 Eugene Debs, "Why I Became a Socialist," in Debs: His Life Writings and Speeches
(Chicago, 1908), p. 82; Iohn Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (New York: Random
House, 1937), p. 26; Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: M y Iourney Through an
Epoch (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 114.
16 John Reed, quoted in Charles A. Madison, Critics and Crusaders (New York: Holt,
1947), p. 470.
1 7 M a X Eastman, "The S.L.P.," The Class Struggle, III (Aug, 1919), 304-06; Robert
Miner to Eastman, April 20, 1919, Eastman mss, Lilly Library, Indiana University,
Bloomington, Ind.
18Danie1 DeLeon, quoted in Fried, p. 194; see also Louis Fraina, "Daniel DeLeon,"
New Review, II (July, 1914), 390-99.
19Dos Passos, 42nd Parallel, p. 94; William D. Haywood, "The Fighting IWW,"
The International Socialist Review, XIII (Sept., 1912), 247.
211). Ramsey MacDonald, quoted in Melvyn Dubofsky, "The Radicalism of the Dis-
possessed: William Haywood and the IWW," in Dissent: Explorations in the History
of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred Young (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press,
19681, p. 177.
21 B111 Haywood, and references to him, quoted in Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left:
Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, 1961), pp. 14,
16-17.

70
 part two
HISTORY
 The Lyrical Left

When I was up at Columbia University, one

of the most unforgettable and most glamor-
ous experiences I recall in my student life
was the first lecture I heard by Max Eastman
before the Socialist Study Club. He came be-
fore us then as the fair-haired apostle of the
new poetry, the knight errant of a new and
rebellious generation, the man who was
making his dreams come true-as poet, as
thinker, as editor, as teacher, as psychologist,
as philosopher, as a yea-sayer of the joy and
adventure of living in the fullest and richest
sense of the word. Even then Max was already
a glamorous, exciting figure in the world
of letters and in the world of adventure. Life
was bursting in all its radiance all around
him. For him existence was a fight, a song,
a revolution, a poem, an affirmation.
Lincoln Schuster to Victor Gollancz, 1936

The fiddles are tuning as it were all over

America.

John Butler Yeats, 1912

Unlike other American Lefts, the first Left of the twentieth century
was born in a mood of unparalleled optimism. "One's first strong im-
pression," recalled Malcolm Cowley, "is one of the bustle and hopeful-
ness that filled the early years from 1911-1916. . . . Everywhere new
institutions were being founded-magazines, clubs, little theatres, art
or free-love or single-tax colonies, experimental schools, picture gal-
leries. Everywhere was a sense of comradeship and immense po-
tentialities for change." The new intellectuals' open-air habitat was 73
 43 Marcel Duchalnp's Nude
Descending a Staircase, No. II,
1912, one of the Futurist-Cubist
paintings that created a furor at
the 1913 Armory Show in New
York City. The show introduced
America to radical new ap-
proaches to the visual arts that
reflected a corresponding recog-
nition of change and flux in life
that animated the Lyrical Left.

Manhattan's Greenwich Village, which Floyd Dell, the chronicler of

Village life, called "a moral health resort"; their spiritual home was 23
Fifth Avenue, Mabel Dodge's notorious apartment where anyone and
everyone who had a plan to remake the world was welcomed: "Social-
ists, Trade-Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers,
Murderers, 'Old Friends/ Psychoanalysts, I.W.W.'s, Single Taxers,
Birth-Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern-Artists, Club-
women, Wo1nen's-Place-is-in-the-Home Women, Clergymen, and just
plain men all met there" to experience "freedom" and exchange
"opinions." l

EARLY RAPTURES
Dell caught the atmosphere of 1912 when, responding to poetess Edna
74 St. Vincent Millay, he labeled it the "Lyric Year." The period seemed an
intellectual Saturnalia in which everything was possible and nothing
prohibited, a joyous springtime in which, Mabel Dodge recalled, "bar-
riers went down and people reached each other who had never been in
touch before." The mood of America's "New Renaissance" was supreme-
ly lyrical, an outpouring of emotions and creative energy that had long
been repressed. Responding to the thrilling labor strikes that spread
from Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Ludlow, Colorado, the literary Left
saw itself as the "music-makers" and "movers and shakers" of a revolu-
tionary culture that aimed to break down the dualism between contem-
plative life and active life. This poetic passion for releasing the emotions
and at the same time unifying thought, feeling, and action gave the first
Left its distinctive lyrical style and tone. "Our eyes trained for every
seeing," wrote Eastman in 1913, "our ears catching the first murmur of a
new experience, we ran after the world in our eagerness, not to learn
about it, but to taste the flavor of its being."2
Politics and Art
The Lyrical radicals went further than any previous generation in
attempting to fuse politics and art. Whereas Emerson and Thoreau
looked upon collective action with disdain, the young intellectuals
44 A Greenwich Village (New York City) gathering place of the early l920's. The inscription
reflects the sense of the "Village" as a center of artistic and political ferment of the time.
111111111111111 lux* .15rss Z! I Q A #K

or 14

*ng

no
embraced it with delight. While the Transcendentalists believed
politics the realm of opinion and poetry the realm of truth, the new
cultural rebellion denied all dichotomies. The Lyrical Left rejected
Yeats' contention that poetry and politics, imagination and truth, pri-
vate vision and public life must inevitably be in eternal opposition.
Rather, the appeal of the prewar Left was its all-encompassing "integra-
tion of conflicting values . . . : politics, poetry, and science; justice,
beauty, and knowledge."3 The lyrical impulse to synthesize influenced
even the sober-minded.Walter Lippmann; in A Preface to Politics (1913),
he sought to humanize government, to elevate it from "routine" pro-
cedures and stale formulas so that "the ideals of human feelings" would
"place politics among the genuine, creative activities of men." Making
man the measure of politics, Lippmann realized, "amounts to saying

45 Matisse's Le Luxe, an-

other painting exhibited at
the controversial 1913 Armory
Show (see Figure 43).
 46 Mabel Dodge, whose
home in Greenwich Village
became a land of salon of
radical thinkers in the arts
and politics.

that the goal of action is in its final analysis aesthetic and not moral -
a quality of feeling instead of a conformity to rule."4
The young intellectuals cheerfully presided over the death of the
"genteel tradition" as they attacked its Victorian standards, polite
manners and haute-bourgeois tastes, its Puritan heritage and decorous
Brahmin literature, and, above all, its condescending certainty that it
had found ultimate truth and absolute value. Forsaking the traditional
quest for permanent truth and value, the young intellectuals embarked
upon a life that embraced change and flux, a new life that had to be
experienced before it could be analyzed. Their odyssey often brought
them to Bergson, James, Nietzsche, Freud, and D. H. Lawrence, heralds
of the antinationalist power of intuition, desire, will, dream, and
instinct. Proclaiming a new ethic of gaiety and sensuality, the Lyrical
rebels proudly declared themselves to be reckless and irresponsible. "A
feeling of power that translates itself into duty is no fun," advised Mabel
Dodge, who believed that "consciousness is more important than
heroism or than any given ethical or political point of view, and I be-
lieve it more desirable to be ignoble and know it than to be noble and
not know it." The "superb modern healthiness" of Dostoevsky, an-
nounced Randolph Bourne, is his ability to draw no "dividing line
between the normal and the abnormal, or even between the sane and
insane." Despite the cult of irresponsibility, many intellectuals who had 77
 been brought up in a religious environment carried with them the heri-
tage against which they rebelled. Their passion for social justice, their
quest for love and friendship, and their thirst for esthetic experience re-
flected the internalized values of their Protestant backgrounds. If they
rejected the capitalist ethos of striving to make good, many retained the
religious ethic of striving to he good. In essence, theirs was a Christian
culture without Christianity. Even so pagan a libertine as Mabel Dodge
could, between taking John Reed as a lover and peyote as an offering,
admit in a moment of doubt: "Finally I believed the lack to be in myself
when I found myself perpetually unassuaged-and, I thought, only
religion will fill me, someday I will find God." But God was dead, and
no one knew this better than the generation of 1913.5
Although a certain sense of orthodox values and a vague spiritual
hunger lingered on, with the collapse of religious beliefs the young
intellectuals tried to find meaning and fulfillment in culture, sex, or
politics-in many cases all three. Some turned to radical politics for a
surrogate religion. For Max Eastman, Marxism would put an end to
spiritual anguish: "I need no longer extinguish my dream with my
knowledge. I need never again cry out: 'I wish I believed in the Son of
God and his second coming.' "6 Until 1917, when the Bolshevik revolu-
tion challenged evolutionary democratic socialism, the Lyrical Left's
radicalism drew upon British Fabian and Guild socialism as well as
Marxism. The Left's socialism was also an outgrowth of a self-conscious
youth culture that, at Harvard and Columbia especially, gave the blasé
high school graduate the option of radical activism or Kulturpessimis-
mus. Students debated socialism in classrooms, fraternities, and at the
meetings of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, where wealthy young
scions from the Ivy League listened to Jack London, the golden-boy
dropout who was becoming America's first millionaire novelist, lecture
on the beauties of the social revolution.
Diversity of" Appeal
Socialism appealed to intellectuals for various reasons. Eastman
saw socialism both as a science and as an esthetic liberation that would
bring forth a life of creative leisure. The whimsical playboy John Reed
78 hoped that struggling for socialism would overcome the mauvais for
- - " "

that plagued him and other middle-class intellectuals: "My happiness is

built on the misery of others . . . that fact poisons me, disturbs my ser-
enity, and makes me write propaganda when I would rather play."7
Lippmann, precocious social philosopher and leading figure in the
Harvard Socialist Club, considered socialism as the only alternative to
the corruption of Tammany Hall and the power of big business. Yet it
is significant that Lippmann, one of the first American intellectuals
to see the relevance to politics of the new irrationalist psychology, was
also one of the first of the Lyrical Left to have reservations about
socialism. Convinced that any political movement must be built upon
a realistic theory of human nature, Lippmann found socialism wanting
in two respects; its idolization of the masses ignored the widespread
visceral need for heroic leaders, and its faith in the inevitable polariza-
tion of classes scarcely took into account the complexity of America's
multiclass structure. At the same time, Lippmann rejected the argument
of Walling's Progressivism and After, that the transition to socialism
would be gradual, proceeding from the state capitalism of the indus-
trialists to the progressive reforms of the middle class. Dismissing
Walling's reasoning as an expression of the "American Dream," Lipp-
mann believed that socialism could be achieved, if at all, only by
organized pressure from the lower classes. That conviction attracted
him to the IWW. Although the Wobblies scorned political activity,
ignored the probability that the state would not disappear after capital-
ism, and seemed not to realize that workers' syndicates could exploit
consumers as much as industrialists, Lippmann still believed the IWW
possessed tremendous potential because, unlike all other radical move-
ments, "It has practiced actual solidarity." Lippmann refrained from
glorifying the IWW, which he regarded as capable of only "insurrec-
tion," but he could agree with Eastman that it was "the only genuinely
proletarian or revolutionary organization that ever existed in Ameri-
ca."8
The New Review and The Masses
The first twentieth-century American Left advertised itself in two dif-
ferent publications, The New Review and The Masses. The former
reflected its sober mind, the latter its soaring spirit. In The New Review 79
 the Left debated the basic issues facing socialism, carried symposia on
the feminist movement, and explored the relatively new field of Negro
history. But this sophisticated theoretical journal was overshadowed
by The Masses, perhaps the heartiest journal in the history of American
radicalism. Free of doctrinal strain, The Masses gave radicalism a well-
needed lift of laughter. Satirical but not cynical, audacious but not self-
righteous, it was animated by eight passions: "fun, truth, beauty, real-
ism, freedom, peace, feminism, revolution."9 Its masthead promised
The Masses would please no one and delight everyone:

A REVOLUTIONARY AND NOT A REFORM MAGAZINE: A MAGAZINE

WITH A SENSE OF HUMOR AND NO RESPECT FOR THE RESPECTABLE:
FRANK, ARROGANT, IMPERTINENT, SEARCHING FOR THE TRUE
CAUSES: A MAGAZINE DIRECTED AGAINST RIGIDITY AND DOGMA
WHEREVER IT IS FOUND: PRINTING WHAT IS TOO NAKED OR TRUE
FOR A MONEY-MAKING PRESS: A MAGAZINE WHOSE FINAL POLICY
IS TO DO AS IT PLEASES AND CONCILIATE NOBODY, NOT EVEN ITS
READERS.

Edited by Eastman with the help of Dell and Reed, The Masses fea-
tured young poets and novelists, reputable journalists, and talented
artists and cartoonists who depicted the foibles of the rich and the
frustrations of the poor. The breezy combination of bohemianism and
radicalism was too much for the stolid labor Left and the old-time
socialists like W. J, Ghent, who complained of The Masses: "It is
peculiarly the product of the restless metropolitan coteries who devote
themselves to the cult of Something Else; who are ever seeking the
bubble Novelty even at the door of Bedlam."10 One wit wondered how
The Masses ever expected to reach the masses:
They draw nude women for the Masses
Thick, fat, ungainly lasses-
How does that help the working classes?11

Socialist attacks failed to dampen the confident bravado of the Lyrical

Left, which did its best to help the lower classes by raising funds for
striking coal and textile workers, by publicizing the plight of immi-
grants and blacks, and by speaking truth to power. What would under-
80 mine its optimism was the subsequent challenge of historic events.
--

. § .41

X31

47 A Iohn Sloan cartoon

from The Masses, entitled
"She Got the Point," com-
ments on the rising femi-
nist awareness Of the
time. The woman in the
foreground says to her
companion: "You'd bet-
ter be good Jim, or I'11
join 'ere." W.S.P. (on the
banner) stands for Worn-
en's Suffrage Party.

CHALLENGES AND CONFLICT

War and the State
The first challenge to the ideals of the Left came with the outbreak
of the First World War in August 1914. From the establishment of the
First International in 1864 to Trotsl<y's attempt to start a Fourth Inter-
national in 1939, the ideal of an international working-class commun-
ity loomed as the great hope of the Left. In the years before the war,
when the ideal seemed close to realization, American radicals assumed
that European workers had achieved the political strength and maturity
to oppose war and declare their solidarity with the Second International.
When war came, however, most socialist parliamentarians approved
military budgets in their respective governments, while workers re-
sponded to the call of nationalism. Radicals had earlier been able to
mount antiwar demonstrations, but once war was declared there were 81
no mass protests, no general strikes, no worldwide labor boycotts. The
proletariat marched off to battle with the rest of the human race.
In December 1914, the American SP issued a manifesto condemning
the war, announcing its neutrality, and declaring it the "supreme duty"
of socialists to rededicate themselves to the "imperishable principles of
international socialism." The manifesto created bitter inner-party de-
bate. To moderates like Hillquit and Spargo the crisis of European
socialism made it clear that workers ultimately placed their country
before their class and that, thus, the concept of proletarian interna-
tionalism was a "frail wand." The more militant Marxists, like Louis
Fraina and Louis Boudin, however, now began to trace the origins of the
war to imperialism, an exercise that enabled them to sustain some faith
in the misguided masses and to suggest that a new International, purged
of all prower elements, could be organized. The majority of socialist
intellectuals and labor leaders changed their positions for various rea-
sons. Some shifted to intervention because of a simple concern for
national security; others feared that a Prussianized, imperialistic Ger-
many presented a threat to democracy and the Left; still others believed
that the war might hasten the coming of socialism as the government
48 Writer Upton Sinclair, one of
many celebrated intellectuals who
left the Socialist Party during the
controversy over its stand on Amer-
ica's entry into the war in 1917.
---

49 A female Secret Service operative infiltrates the alleged women's branch of the IWW in a
scene from a propaganda film made in 1918.

nationalized industry. For three years the Left continued to debate the
nature and consequences of the war. By April 1917, when President
Wilson went before Congress to ask for a declaration of war, most lead-
ing socialist writers had already advocated America's intervention.
Despite the defection of intellectual luminaries like Walling, London,
Simons, and Upton Sinclair, the SP convention issued another antiwar
resolution the day after Wilson's address to Congress. The resolution,
approved by three-fourths of the delegates, had the support of political
leaders like Debs, Hillquit, and Berger. The SP's courageous action
proved to be a short-run triumph and a long-run disaster. Shortly after-
wards the SP increased its membership by more than 12,000, and in
various municipal elections in June socialist candidates gained new
support from antiwar voters. But ultimately the SP suffered a psychic
wound as members began to accuse one another of class betrayal or na- 83
tonal treason. The prower socialist Charles E. Russell thought his
former comrades "should be driven out of the country," and the mil-
lionaire socialist J. G. Phelps Stokes suggested they be "shot at once
without an hour's delay."12
Though the government did not go that far, it went far enough. In
June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act (supplemented in 1918
by a Sedition Act), that forbade all obstruction of the war effort. lm~
mediately the U.S. Post Office denied mailing privileges to socialist
publications, and while editors tried vainly to fight their case in court,
the government moved against the SP itself. Before the war was over
almost every major SP official had been indicted for antiwar activity.
Enraged mobs had also cracked down on radical dissent everywhere.
Throughout the country IWW headquarters were raided. In Oklahoma,
Wobblies were rounded up and tarred and feathered; in Arizona they
were packed into cattle cars and abandoned in the desert; and in Mon-
tana, Frank Little, a crippled IWW leader, was kidnapped and hanged
from a railway trestle. The repression bore down heavily on antiwar
liberals as well. At Columbia University three professors were fired for
having criticized American intervention, whereupon the eminent his-
torian Charles Beard resigned in protest. Watching this affair, Colum-
bia graduate Randolph Bourne visited one of the dismissed professors,
his friend Harold C. Dana.

"And now that you have been expelled, Harry, will you make the scandal?"
"Certainly not," Dr. Dana said. "I've given my word as a gentleman."
"That's the trouble," Bourne replied with a wide grin. "You look upon all
this as a gentlemen's quarrel. You lack Homeric anger."13
 Gentlemen scholars were not the only ones who disappointed the
Lyrical Left. Everywhere the intellectual community seemed to be
capitulating. Isadora Duncan, who once symbolized the liberating joys
of the body, was now performing patriotic dances in the Metropolitan
Opera House. Former Masses contributors had gone to work for the
Cornrnittee on Public Information, Wilson's official propaganda
agency; honored intellectuals like Veblen, Dewey, and the former
socialist Lippmann had also come out strongly in support of America's
entry into the war.
The Lyrical Left, always an uneasy alliance of disparate radicals with
different causes, was now hopelessly divided by the war. Randolph
Bourne leveled the most devastating attack on the prower intellectuals.
Bourne, who had once studied under Dewey, could not accept his argu-
rnent that the conscientious objector should "attach his conscience and
intelligence to forces moving in another direction" in order to assure
that the war be elevated toward democratic ends. "War," Bourne point-
ed out, "determines its own end-victory, and government crushes out
automatically all forces that deflect, or threaten to deflect, energy from
the path of organization to that end." Similarly Eastman could not ac-
cept Walling's argument that intellectuals must "adjust themselves to
events." A war based upon "blind tribal instincts," Eastman pointed
out, rendered events beyond rational control. Like Bourne, Eastman saw
"no connection with its causes or the conscious purposes of those who
fight. . . . It is a war of national invasion and defense -nationalism, the
most banal of stupid idol-worships." John Reed also warned of the
"judicial tyranny, bureaucratic suppression, and industrial barbarism,

50 Wobblies interned by the

government in 1917 because of
their antiwar views.

IBS33H
which followed inevitably the first careless rapture of militarism."
What remained of the Lyrical Left, then, rejected both the assumption,
held by some socialists, that a war economy offered the possibility of
industrial collectivism and the hope, held by many Liberals, that the
war could bring about worldwide democracy. "For once the babes and
sucklings seem to have been wiser than the children of light," observed
Bourne.14
The behavior of prower writers like Walling and Lippmann also re-
vived the Marxist distrust of a young "intellectual proletariat." The
New Intellectuals that had earlier been hailed as a potential revolution-
ary vanguard now appeared to be "a corrupt and corrupting influence
[whose] petty bourgeois souls scent the flesh pots of Imperialism. . . .
In every imperialistic country it is precisely these 'workers of the brain'
who manufacture and carry into the ranks of the workers the ideology
and the enthusiasm of Imperialisrn."15 Although the Lyrical Left's
idealism was severely damaged by the defection of the intellectuals, the

5...

r*

.up - f
a

is

'L+
M
*
i

51 Dancer Isadora Duncan, one

of the many stars of the cultural
and intellectual world seen by the
Left as an exponent of sensual and
artistic liberation.

.
..... .. .
52 From left, Crystal Eastman, Art Young, Max Eastman, Morris Hillquit, Merrill Rogers,
In., and Floyd Dell at the time of their indictment under the Sedition Act of 1918 for opposing
America's entry into the First World War.
o

real deathblow came from the response of the masses to the war. The
popular upsurge of nationalism was a source of repression that the Left
had not fully anticipated. Eastman and Bourne pondered the social and
psychological meaning of war and nationalism in two significant
essays: "The Religion of Patriotism," that Eastman wrote in 1916, and
"The State," that Bourne started in 1917 but did not finish before his
untimely death the following year. Both Eastman and Bourne believed
that the war had laid bare the "gregarious instinct" and "herd impulse"
of the human animal, and by transforming man's aggressive drives into
illusions of power and idealism had brought about a nationalistic
solidarity that strangled critical intelligence. "There is nothing more
copiously able to bind into its bosom the multiple threads of human
impulse, and establish that fixed and absolute glorious tyranny among
our purposes, than military patriotism," wrote Eastman. "The nation in 87
 war-time," observed Bourne, "attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierar-
chy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal. . . .
The individual as a social being in war seems to have achieved almost
his apotheosis." More than culture or class conflict, war was the real
catalyst that moved the masses to idealistic acts of self-sacrifice and de-
lusions of "organic" wholeness. In despair, Bourne penned an epigram
for a whole generation when he shrewdly commented: "War is the
health of the State."16

Bolshevism: The Triumph

Four thousand miles away an obscure Russian exile, Vladimir lich
Lenin, reached the opposite conclusion. In his anarcho-syndicalist State
and Revolution (1917) Lenin seemed to show that war was the sickness
of the state and the health of revolution. In the eyes of the American
Left, Lenin would soon emerge as the prophet who proved his theory of
power.
In February 1917, the Russian tsarist government collapsed with the
dull thud of an historic anachronism; in October the bolsheviks swept
into power. The American Left reacted enthusiastically to the first event
and ecstatically to the second. Although the triumph of Lenin defied the
"laws" of Marxism, it answered the needs of American radicals. The last
place a proletarian revolution was expected to occur was in Russia, a
backward country that lacked the industrial base to make the transition
to socialism. Moreover, the revolution appeared to have been "made"
by the determined imagination and will of a small minority of 12,000
party leaders and intellectuals. It seemed that in Russia the radical
intelligentsia had found at last a way to socialism that bypassed the
long, arduous route of reform. If Russian intellectuals could create a
revolution in an agricultural country, what could stop American intel-
lectuals from doing the same in an industrialized society? To America's
Left, dejected and rendered powerless by the war, Lenin's stunning
achievement was Marx's second coming.
Not surprisingly, the American Left interpreted the revolution in its
own disparate ideological images and every faction identified with the
bolsheviks. Eastman believed that even the February Revolution created
88 in one blow a "Syndicalist-Socialist Russia." When the bolsheviks
-.---"'

triumphed over the Provisional Government, the DeLeonists claimed

that the wisdom of revolutionary industrial unionism had been proven.
Reed's eyewitness account, Ten Days That Shook the World, was later
smuggled to the Wobbly prisoners in Leavenworth Penitentiary, and the
old Wobbly official Harold Varna announced that "Bolshevism was
but the Russian name for IWW." Even reformist socialists who had de-
nounced the doctrine of violence came to the defense of the violent
bolsheviks. James Oneal ridiculed those who protested that "there has
been violence in Russia. Some violence in a revolution! Just imagine!
Do they think a revolution is a pink tea party?" Moderate leaders like
Hillquit defended the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as democratic;
and Debs, the most gentle radical of all, proclaimed: "From the crown of

l
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53 In a cartoon from
The Masses, one bloated
plutocrat: "But we can't
send 'em all off to the
war to be killed. We've
got to have 'am around
to keep wages down."
And the reply: "M-]I11
and if they stay here
they may join the IWW
and raise hell."
 my head to the soles of my feet I am a Bolshevik, and proud of it." Emma
Goldman and Alexander Berk ran immediately sailed off to Russia to
witness what they assumed would be the glorious birth of anarchism,
and Lincoln Steffens returned from Russia to tell Americans, "I have
been over into the future, and it works."17
One cannot overemphasize the utopian, democratic image that sur-
rounded bolshevism in its first months in power. The image of a
"peoples' democracy" and a "commune state" enraptured the entire
spectrum of the American Left: anarchists, syndicalists, revolutionary
socialists, democratic socialists, and even a number of pacifists, social
reformers, and liberal intellectuals. One by one most of these elements
grew disenchanted with bolshevism, and within a few years its remain-
ing American admirers dwindled to a small circle of comrades whose
infatuation with Soviet power bore little resemblance to the original
ideals of the American Left. Two developments account for the change
of attitudes toward Russia: the centralization of the American com-
munist parties, and the Stalinization of international communism.
When the bolshevil<s seized power, American radicals wanted to
prove that they too were revolutionaries and not timid "mensheviks" or
discredited reformers. This impulse led native radicals to look to the
Russian-language Federation in the SP as the organic tie to bolshevism.
The Russian Federation was composed of recent Slavic immigrants who
knew almost nothing about bolshevism, but the Russian-Americans
encouraged the illusion that only they could speak for Lenin and Trot-
sky. The left wing began to champion the Russian Federation, which,
together with the Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Leftish,
and Dutch federations, comprised a majority in the SP. The spokesman
for the left wing was Louis Fraina. A brilliant young Marxist and one of
the founding fathers of American communism, Fraina had developed
a new theory of "mass action" in Revolutionary Socialism (1918). In
February 1919, militants issued Fraina's "Left-Wing Manifesto," which
condemned the right wing for its tepid "sausage socialism" and, in the
spirit of Russian bolshevism, called upon Americans to organize
workers' councils as a means of taking power and establishing a prole-
tarian dictatorship in the United States. The following month the Third
90 International was born in Moscow. In order to disassociate themselves
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54 In its art as in its poetry, the Lyrical Left was moved to rapture by the example
of Leni.n's achievement.

from the social democrats, the bolsheviks revived Marx's use of the term
"comrnunism." The new Communist International (soon condensed to
"Comintern") ordered every socialist party in the world to split from its
right-wing factions. A fierce struggle now ensued for control of Ameri-
can socialism. A national referendum indicated that the majority of
socialists desired to join the Third International, and another referen-
dum for the election of a new National Executive Committee gave a
decisive majority to the left wing. But the right wing simply dismissed
the vote and began to suspend the seven left-wing, foreign-language 91
 federations. Within six months the SP lost two-thirds of its member-
ship, declining from 109,589 to 39,750. Disgusted, left-wing leaders
bolted and formed a separate communist organization, which immedi-
ately broke into two factions, the Communist Party and the Communist
Labor Party. The larger CP was made up of the foreign-language federa-
tions and headed by Fraina and Charles Ruthenberg; the smaller CLP of
native American radicals was led by Reed and Benjamin Gitlow. Al-
though the CP and CLP fought incessantly over organizational ques-
tions and over the "correct" interpretation of Marxis t-Leninism, both
groups espoused the revolutionary imperative of "mass action."18
In the year 1919, which Dos Passos likened to "the springtime of
revolution," things did seem ripe for a radical solution. Labor unrest
had gripped the country as longshoremen, printers, switchmen, tailors,
garment workers, telephone personnel, streetcar conductors, and gar-
bage collectors walked off their jobs. Outside the numerous plants of
United States Steel some 367,000 workers took turns on the picket
line for a period of four months; in Seattle a city-wide strike was called;
and in Boston salary-gouged policemen did not report for work, where-
upon scores of college students, answering Governor Coolidge's call to
God and country, helped maintain law and order. Yet while one of the
greatest strike waves in American history was taking place, commu-
nists remained on the sidelines, scorning the reforms demanded by
workers and condemning trade unionism. The Bolshevik revolution
taught American communists to hold out for nothing less than revolu-
tion. But as they awaited the "inevitable" revolution, the predictable
reaction set in. Wartime espionage and sedition laws were now used
against communists and anarchists as Attorney General Palmer directed
unannounced raids against their homes and headquarters. During the
Red Scare of 1919 and the early 1920's the membership of both com-
munist parties declined from over 60,000 to under 10,000. The remain-
ing dedicated communists decided to go underground. Life in secret cell
meetings increased their revolutionary fervor. Now American com-
munists could regard themselves as real bolsheviks, hounded by the
police just as Lenin and Trotsky had been hounded by the Tsar's
Ochrana. Repression in America, as in Tsarist Russia, was merely fur-
92 ther proof that revolution was just around the corner.

55 Ben Shahs's The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti commemorates the execu-
tion of the two anarchists accused of murder and robbery. The case was a
cause célébre of what little remained of the prewar Left in the l920's.
A

...
.. ...
 56 Leftists being taken into custody during one of the raids directed by United
States Attorney General Palmer in the 1920's.

Bolshevism: The Disenchantment

By the time the Red Scare had passed and the communists surfaced in
late 1921, the international situation had begun to change. Even though
American communists could not give up their revolutionary illusions,
Lenin was shrewd enough to realize that while it still might be inevita-
ble, revolution was no longer imminent. In "Left-Wing" Communism:
An Infantile Disorder (1920), Lenin lashed out at the revolutionary
impatience of the ultra-Left communists in the West. The two Ameri-
can parties, the CP and the CLP, had already been ordered by the Com-
intern to bury their differences and unite into one organization. Ameri-
can communists willingly accepted this directive from Moscow. But
Lenin's tactical shift to the right came as a shock to many members.
For communists were now told to establish a legitimate party, engage in
electoral activity, and later to form "united fronts" with other progres-
sive groups. Even more stunning, they were ordered to work within
rather than against unions, not to destroy the AFL but to infiltrate it.
This was the most painful irony of all. Lenin, the uncompromising
94 revolutionary, was now ordering American radicals to practice what
I

they had denounced the SP for engaging in since the turn of the century
-political activity and trade unionism. These decisions bewildered
left-wing leaders like Haywood and Fraina, who were to become in-
creasingly disenchanted with the Moscow-dominated CP. But others
stayed in the CP and subordinated themselves to the Comintern.
The remaining history of the CP during the twenties is a grotesque
story of inner-party struggle, ego rivalry, and character assassination.
The Communist, Workers Monthly, and Revolutionary Age occasion-
ally featured high-level theoretical discussions. The controversy over
"American exceptionalism"-can America's historical and economic
development be understood solely in Marxist terms; and, if not, must
America find its own way to the goals of Marx?-laid the groundwork
for a half century of subsequent debate among American radical in-
tellectuals. Yet what is significant about the factional debates of the
l 920's is the manner in which they were resolved. In almost every
instance the disputes were settled, despite the majority will of the
American CF, either by a cablegram from the Comintern or by a trip
to Moscow. This deference made the American CP an instrument that
Joseph Stalin, the new dictator of the Soviet Union, gladly exploited to
further Russia's interests. "Can anyone in his right mind," the Trotsky-
ist Max Scliactman would later lament, "imagine leaders of socialism
.
like Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, . . Debs, DeLeon, Haywood . . . racing
back and forth between their countries and the seat of the Second Inter-
national, appealing to its Executive to make the decision on what policy
their parties should be commanded to adopt?"19 The generation of 1913
could not have imagined such a spectacle. The Stalinization of the
American Left was the end of radical innocence.
During the 1920's communism had few admirers among those who
had been the prewar intellectual rebels. Lenin's State and Revolution
was compatible with the anarcho-syndicalist visions of The Masses
circle; but his "Left-Wing" Communism could hardly inspire those
who once believed that "infantile disorder" was part of revolutionary
adventure. Older socialists like Hillquit and liberals like Steffens con~
tinned to defend the Soviet Union against its conservative critics in
America. But those closer to the spirit of the prewar rebellion found
nothing to defend. Emma Goldman, the anarchist heroine of the Lyr- 95
 57 Anarchist and femi-
nist Emma Goldman, one
of the first to admire and
one of the first to be disil-
lusioned by the Soviet
Union.

cal Left, watched in horror as Lenin crushed the Russian anarchists

in the Kronstadt uprising in 1921, and embattled Wobblies soon gave
up hope that Russian workers would have their own independent
unions under bolshevism or that American workers would have their
own voice in the CP. Ultimately communism became a repudiation of
two basic ideals that had inspired the Lyrical Left: the autonomy of
the intellectual and the self-liberation of ,the working class. Under
Stalin political "truth" became the test of culture and the intellectual
was forced to defend, not the unorganized American workers, but the
tightly organized Communist Party.

THE ODYSSEYS OF REED AND EASTMAN

TWO PATTERNS OF DISILLUSIONMENT
Typical of the disillusionment of what remained of the Lyrical Left
were the reactions of John Reed and Max Eastman.
Reed
John Silas Reed's transformation from a lonely, insecure, wealthy
student to a dedicated revolutionary who died in Russia of malnutrition
and typhus is an experience in some ways unique, in some typical of
the Left intellectual of the period. Unlike most early American commu-
96 nists, Reed was neither an i11].rllig1'aI1t, a city-bred easterner, a self-
-__

educated worker-intellectual, nor a stern Marxist ideologue. A robust,

pleasure-loving youth who would become an acquaintance of Lenin
and Trotsky, an important American figure in the early Comintern, a
patron saint of the American Communist Party, and a hero buried near
the Kremlin wall along with the fallen heroes of 1917, Reed was as
American as breakfast cereal.
Born and raised in an elegant mansion in Portland, Oregon, Reed
attended prep school and then Harvard, where his greatest thrill was
becoming the star cheerleader and enjoying "the blissful sensation of
swaying two thousand voices in great crashing choruses during the
football games." In college he was indifferent to politics and regarded
his courses as insipid exercises one had to endure while gaining a place
in the prestigious social clubs. When Lincoln Steffens came to interview
him about a position in journalism, Reed told his idol of his ambitions:
"To make a million dollars . . . to get married . . . to write my name in
letters of fire against the Sky." Reed's ambition for fame and fortune
sprang from a deeper romantic desire, a restless, Byronic temperament
that enabled him to become, without much ideological reflection, the
poet-playboy of the Lyrical Left. Reed inherited his father's sympathy
for the underdog, and his passionate commitment to verse suggests that
his radicalism also grew out of an esthetic temperament, a Faustian
hunger for the fullness of life. He was easily moved by the drama of
history and the majesty of great men and great deeds. "History was my
passion, kings strutting about and armored ranks of men," he recalled.
Later, in Venice with Mabel Dodge, he repeated to her the beauties of
history. "The things men have done! But I wish that I could have been
there at the doing of it, or that they were doing it now."2u
When Reed moved to Greenwich Village, he instantly fell in love
with the bohemian culture, New York's "wild ungovernable youth"
whose "monuments uncouth" produced in him "a fierce joy of crea-
tion." Here Reed also fell in love with Mabel Dodge. "His olive green
eyes glowed Softly," sighed Dodge, "his high forehead was like a baby's
with light brown curls rolling away from it and two spots of shining
light on his temples, making him lovable. His chin was the best . . . the
real poet's jawbone . . . eyebrows always lifted . . . generally breath-
less!"2I During the joyous years before the war Reed wrote winsorne 97
 ..... .
..
.. .... .

58 Iohn Reed, poet-journa1-

ist and revolutionary, one
of the romantic heroes of the
Lyrical Left.

verse, participated in the Paterson, New Jersey, garment workers' strike

(during which he was jailed and organized the subsequently famous
Paterson strike pageant), tried peyote ("these nauseatingly bitter but-
tons"), lived with various Village girls, and, on a trip to Paris, showed
Mabel Dodge "what a honeymoon should be." But Reed soon became
absorbed by the course of world events, and in 1913 he abandoned
"man-eating Mabel" to see and write about war and revolution. His
career from this point on reads like a Hemingway postscript to Huckle-
berry Finn. With an army of companeros he rode through Mexico to
write about the exploits of the Robin Hood revolutionary Pancho Villa;
a year later, when war broke out in Europe, he was off to France and
then to the dreary eastern front; and after returning to the United States
in 1917, he again rushed off to Russia as soon as he heard that the
Roniianov dynasty had crumbled."
Reed arrived in Russia two months before the bolsheviks came to
98 power. Inirnediately he visited the liberal democrats' Duma, made his
way into the bolshevik headquarters and interviewed its leaders, then
addressed bewildered Russian workers in English, sped around Petro-
grad in a truck passing out Russian-language leaflets that he could not
read, and participated in the storming of the Winter Palace, smuggling
out a jewel-handled sword for a souvenir. Reed's sympathy for the
downtrodden and his attraction to bold, dynamic leaders moved him
to side with the bolsheviks. As he watched them seizing power he col-
lected every item he could find-leaflets, newspapers, reports, resolu-
tions, interviews, press clippings, peeled-off posters-to use in writing
his vivid account of the greatest social cataclysm in modern history,
Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed came back to the United States
a confirmed bolshevik, but just how long he remained so is a matter
of controversy. In 1919 he returned to Russia to seek a solution to the
factionalism that had split the two American communist parties. He
arrived suffering from scurvy and malnutrition after two months of
hunger and filth in a Finnish jail. Already distraught because of his
illness, he became demoralized when he saw the suffering of the Rus-
sian people. The final blow was his treatment by Zinoviev and Radek,
the Comintern's two leading officials. Reed had been at odds with the
Cornintern since it had announced its new trade-union line. To Reed
the Bolshevik revolution had been like the fulfillment of a Wobbly
dream, an egalitarian uprising that put an end to all authority. Now
new authorities were ordering American radicals to forsake the IWW
and join the AFL. When officials tried to prevent Reed from presenting
his case before the Second Congress of the Comintern, he resigned in
disgust from its Executive Committee. No doubt Reed was appalled
by the high-handed methods of the Comintern, but whether he had
made a complete break with communism before his death is another
question.
In an authoritative analysis, "The Mystery of John Reed," Theodore
Draper concluded that there was no evidence of a "final accounting"
and "definitive break" with communism. "But if disillusionment is
understood intellectually and emotionally, Reed was probably as dis-
illusioned as it was possible to be and still remain in the movement.
His disillusionment was cumulative, and it was heading toward a
break on both sides if he had persisted on his course." Had Reed lived 99
 it is most likely that he would have resigned from the CP if the CP did
not expel him first. Yet it is doubtful that Reed would have become a
renegade from radicalism, as did much of the Old Left of the l930's.
As Draper puts it: "Disillusionment there was, deeply implanted, but
. . . John Reed had probably paid for his faith too dearly to give it up
without another struggle."'»8" This struggle might have brought him to
side with Trotsky (a hero of Ten Days That Shook the World), the course
taken by the other remaining spirit of the Lyrical Left, Max Eastman.

Eastman
Like Reed, Eastman came from a Protestant, upper-middle-class
background, and he too experienced all the tensions that parental
dependency, sexual awareness, and religious doubt could produce in a
sensitive adolescent. Unlike Reed, with his youthful romantic egotism,
Eastman expressed a combination of paganism and piety. His "heroic"
mother and "sainted" father were both Congregational ministers, and
their "Christian ideal," he later recalled, "demands that life itself, as
we live it, be transcended and superseded and changed. It is a utopian
ideal, and ethically, at least, revolutionary."24 This evangelical en-
vironment was the source of Eastman's social radicalism and also his

59 Big Bill Haywood of the IWW pays his respects at the grave of John Reed in Moscow.
n|-;-.--r-

moral conservatism, which made him uncomfortable with the flaunt-

ing libertinism of some of his comrades. Eastman was also more learned
than the younger Reed and the other Masses writers. Something of a
Renaissance radical, he would write over twenty books dealing with
art, science, poetry, philosophy, humor, journalism, esthetics, anthro-
pology, religion, Marxism, German politics, and Freudian psychology,
as well as five volumes of verse, a novel, two volumes of brilliant bio-
graphical portraits, and a study of the young Trotsky. After mastering
Russian in a little more than a year, he translated the works of Pushkin
and Trotsky, edited Marx's momentous Das Kapital, and clipped to-
gether a film documentary on the Russian Revolution.
Tall, lean, tanned, and strikingly handsome with his blond wavy
hair and deep, pensive eyes, Eastman was the best-known literary
radical of his generation. "He looked Beauty and spoke Iustice," ex-
claimed a close friend.25 Eastman's life before the war was one continual
round of cultural and political activities. He brought the Wobblies'
struggle to public attention, championed the radical feminists, and,
together with his sister Crystal, organized the American Union Against
Militarism. Before the bolsheviks came to power none of The Masses
group had heard of Lenin, and even afterwards so little was known of
him in the United States that his name was frequently misspelled. But
Eastman immediately sensed the man's greatness. To Eastman, Lenin
was a philosopher-king and a social engineer whose language "was
that of astute, flexible, undoctrinaire, unbigoted, supremely purposive,
and, I judged, experimental intelligence." Eastman came to believe
that Marxism's "dialectical reason" implied a practical mode of thought
unencumbered by the constricting demands of abstract theory, and he
would later quote Lenin as saying, "Flexibility of conception, flexibility
to the point of the identity of opposite-that is the essence of the dialec-
tic." All this was seductive. No doubt Lenin was a practical genius who
acted pragmatically and realistically, but Eastman assumed that Marx-
ism itself represented an open-ended, pragmatic philosophy. "To me
the procedure was experimental, and the ideas were subject to correc-
tion." At bottom, Marxism appealed to Eastman's two contradictory
impulses-his idealism and his realism, his yearning for the imagina-
tive world of the possible beyond the actual, and his dispassionate 101
 scientific respect for the actual world of facts and experience. "It was
this clash of impetuosities, the thirst of extreme ideals and the argu-
mentative clinging to facts, which led me to seize SO joyfully upon
Marx's idea of progress through class struggle." As a philosophical
proposition, Marxism seemed the resolution of the eternal dualism of
facts and values, science and esthetics, reality and desire. Marxism
also appeared to have resolved one of the greatest problems in social
theory: how to attain a perfect society with imperfect human beings.
Eastman recalled Mark Twain's answer when the novelist was asked
what he thought about socialism: "I can't even hope for it. I know too
much about human nature." Marxism offered a solution to Twain's
and Eastman's dilemma. While acknowledging the limitations of his-
toric man, it enabled contemporary man "to line up fiercely with the
ideal against the real." As a dialectical philosophy that negated all
dualisms, Marxism resolved all contradictions.

This man Marx seemed to offer a scheme for attaining the ideal based on
the very facts which make it otherwise unattainable. Instead of trying to
change human nature, I said to myself, he takes human nature as it is,
and with that as a driving force tries to change the conditions that make
it work badly. Far from glorying in a new "conversion," I was loath even
to call my new-found equilibrium socialism. I called it "hard-headed
idealisrn."26

Eastman would later re-examine his "Americanization of Marxism."

Meanwhile he enthusiastically supported the left-wing socialists who
wanted to break with the SP, and his new paper, The Liberator (suc-
cessor to the government-suppressed Masses), endorsed the Comintern.
But as with Reed, Eastman's ardor began to cool when he visited Russia
in 1922 "to find out whether what I have been saying is true." At first
he was impressed by the Red Army and by the energy and health of the
Russian people. Bolshevik leaders gratefully received him as a trusted
ally, and Trotsky befriended him as an intellectual comrade. But while
Eastman toured the countryside and studied Russian in the Marx-
Engels Institute Library, Stalin began to launch the campaign against
Trotsky. Even though Eastman attended the 1928> Party Congress he was
"unaware of the beastlike struggle for power that was in progress behind
102 the scenes of this high-minded discussion." Then the dense macabre
1 - l l l l l " " '
11-l15 l»\An.cl4 Una 15 CENTS

LIBERATOR
MAL. £15 {`\IA1\ PAIN!
`\

.I-

I
I
I
I

60 An issue of The Liber-

ator when it was under the
editorship of Max Eastman.

unfolded with Lenin's death in Ianuary 1924. As the party hacks or "ap-
paratchiks " began their move against the anti-Stalin opposition,
Trotsky advised Eastman to leave the country with documents that
would expose Russia's internal struggle for power. Those documents
included a section of Lenin's last "Testament," in which the Premier,
dictating on his deathbed, called for Stalin's removal from the post of
General Secretary. Eastman published them in 1925 in Since Lenin
Died, and he defended Trotsky as a "genius" whose "superior moral
and intellectual revolutionary greatness" made him Lenin's logical
successor. Trotsky's failure to act upon those revelations and the defeat
of the opposition in Russia made the Stalinization of American corn-
munism a certainty.27
Unlike Reed, Eastman had not been troubled by Lenin's shift to the
right on the trade union issue, which could be regarded as evidence
of Lenin's ideological flexibility. Actually it was Trotsky, Eastman's
hero, who turned out to be the hesitating Hamlet, the "unarmed
prophet" who failed to act pragmatically and decisively. But the defeat 103
 of the anti-Stalinist opposition was not the only cause of Eastman's
disillusionment. He had always been uneasy because Russian bolshe-
viks relied upon Marxism as a body of "sacred scripture" instead of a
"working hypothesis." He now began to explore the philosophical
foundations of Marxism by studying its most esoteric premise: "dialec-
tical materialism." In Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution
(1927), and in several other essays, running debates, and books pub-
lished subsequently, Eastman posed two simple but embarrassing epis-
temological questions: how did Marx come to know what he knew, and
how do we know that it is true?
According to Eastman, Marx did not arrive at his understanding of
the meaning and direction of history from an objective, scientific study
of present and past societies. Instead, Marx's conviction that society
moves, through determined stages, toward an inevitable goal derived
from the philosophy of Hegel. The dialectical philosophy of Hegel
postulated an "inner logic" in history, a universal law of motion that
revolved around the principle of contradiction and reconciliation.
Marx transferred this principle of change through conflict and resolu-
tion from the realm of abstract ideas to the world of concrete social
reality. Thus, he assumed that capitalism harbored the "seeds of its
own destruction," that it produced its own "contradiction" when it
created an industrial proletariat, which in turn would revolt against
capitalism and usher in the final resolution, the "end of pre-history"-
socialism. To Eastman, this system of historical reasoning seemed like
a form of "animistic thinking." lust as primitive man attributed human
values and ideals to trees and other natural objects, Marx attributed
to the natural processes of history the unfolding of human ideals. Marx
accepted Hegel, Eastman argued, in much the same way as nonscientific
man accepts "religion"-as a means of reconciling himself to a universe
in which he feels alienated. Marx believed in the coming of revolution
because his belief enabled him to overcome his estrangement from a
world without justice, meaning, or value- Thus he read into history
his own purposes and desires, telling it, not like it was, but as he wished
it to be. In short, Hegelianism enabled Marx to identify the desirable
with the inevitable-an identification Eastman rejected as a Freudian
104 expression of the "rationalization of wish." The crux of Eastlnan's
critique of dialectical materialism was to show that belief in the in-
evitability of communism was not a scientific proposition. That capital-
ism morally "ought" to collapse was no basis for predicting that it
would."
The original spirits of the first Left of the twentieth century, John
Reed and Max Eastman offered no inspiring legacy to future generations
of the American Left. In the thirties, Reed, the "lost revolutionary,"
would be rediscovered by a younger generation as a symbol of bohemian
radicalism while communists manipulated his legend to suit the party
line. Eastman, a pariah to the communists, would gain the respect of a
few anti-Stalinist Left intellectuals of the late thirties for his support
of Trotsky and his critiques of dialectical philosophy"-and even in
the early phase of the New Left, the Berkeley activist Mario Savio could
say: "A lot of Hegel got mixed in with Marx's notion of history. Max
Eastman pointed this out. The dialectic was a way in which Marx made
the course of history coincide with his own unconscious desires."30
But by and large the Old Left of the 1930's and the New Left of the 1960's
knew little or nothing of the experiences of the founding generation of
the American Left. Much of the Old Left would willingly accept the
Comintern domination that Reed so vigorously resisted, and the New
Left would later, with the help of Herbert Marcuse, celebrate the very
Hegelianism in Marx which Eastman so deftly disclosed. Perhaps each
generation must re-enact the ceremony of innocence; each must repu-
diate the past even while repeating it.

Notes
lMalcolm Cowley, quoted in William E. Leucthenburg, The Perils of Prosperity,
1914-1932 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 140; Floyd Dell, Homecoming,
pp. 356-59; Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memoirs, Vol. III, Movers and Shakers
(New York- Kraus, 1936), pp. 39, 83.
2I\/lax Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry (New York: Scribner, 1913), pp. 10-11; see also
Van Wyck Brooks, Arnerica's Coming-of-Age (New York: Dutton, 1915).
3)osep]:t Freeman, An American Testament (New York: Farrar, 1936), p. 50.
Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, p. ZOO, passim.
5 Luhan, Movers and Shakers, p. 264; Mabel Dodge to Eastman, May 10, 1938, East-
man Mss; Randolph Bourne, quoted in Henry F. May, The End of American Inno-
cence (New York: Knopf, 1959), p. 244.
6Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 355. 105
 7 Reed, "Almost Thirty," pp. 18-19.
*?>Walter Lippmann, "Walling's 'Progressivisrn and After,' " New Review, II (June,
1914), 340-49; id., "The WW-Insurrection or Reaction," New Review, I (Aug.,
1913), 701-06; id., A Preface to Politics, p. 29; Eastman, Love and Revolution, p. 126.
9 De11, p. 251.
10W. I. Ghent, quoted in Fried, Socialism in America, p. 384.
11The "wit," quoted in Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of
Modem American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1942), p. 169.
12 Charles E. Russell and J. G. Phelps Stokes, quoted in Fried, Socialism in America,
pp. 508-09.
13Randolph Bourne, quoted in Freeman, An American Testament, pp. 105-06.
14 Randolph Bourne, "A War Diary," in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays,
1915-1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 36-47; Eastman, Enjoyment
of Living, pp. 533-34; Iohn Reed, "One Solid Month of Liberty," The Masses, IX
(sept, 1917), 5-6.
Fraina, Revolutionary Socialism: A Study of Socialist Reeonstruction (New
15 Louis
York: The Communist Press, 1918), pp. 62-63.
16l\/lax Eastman, "The Religion of Patriotism," The Masses, IX (July, 1917), 8-12;
Randolph Bourne, "The State," in War and the Intellectuals, pp. 65-104.
17Draper, Roots of American Communism, pp. 109-13.
18"The Communist Labor Party," The Class Struggle (editorial), III (Nov., 1919),
438-43.
l9Max Schactman, "American Communism: A Re-Examination of the American
Past," The New International, XXIII (Fall, 1957), 225.
1'DReed, "Almost Thirty," pp. 8-18; Bertram D. Wolfe, Strange Communists I Have
Known (New York: Bantam, 1967), pp. 11-35.
21 Luhan, p. 189.
22Ric11ard O'Connor and Dale L. Walker, The Lost Revolutionary: A Biography of
Cohn Reed (New York: Harcourt, 1967).
23 Draper, pp. 284-93.
24 Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, pp. xiv-xv, 15-18, 23-26.
25 Freeman, p. 103.
25 Eastman, Love and Revolution, pp. 14-16, 125-32; id., Marx and Lenin: The
Science of Revolution (New York: Albert Boni, 1927).
27 Eastman, Love and Revolution, pp. 350-56; id., Since Lenin Died (New York:
Liveright, 1925) ; id., Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (New York: Greenberg,
1925), p. V.
9-8Eastrnan later brought together all his arguments in Marxism is it Science (New
York: Norton, 1940).
29 Eastman helped Trotsky publish his works in the United States and he tried to
help the exile obtain a visa to enter the country. But the two had a falling out over
the issue of dialectical materialism. Eastman to Trotsky, July 9, 192.9, August 14,
1933, Eastman mss; Trotsky to C. V. Calverton, November 4, 1932, Trotsky Archives,
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
301i/lario Savio, quoted in Lewis S. Feuer, The Conflict of Generations: The Character
106 and Significance of Student Movements (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. sos.
 The Old Left
Every time I've encountered the Depression,
it has been used as a barrier and club. It's
been a counter-communication. Older people
use it to explain to me that I can't understand
anything. I didn't live through the Depres-
sion. They never say to me: We can't under-
stand you because we didn't live through the
leisure society. All attempts at communica-
tion are totally blocked. All of a sudden
there's a generation gap. It's a frightening
thing.
What they're saying is: For twenty years
I've starved and worked hard. You might
fight. It's very Calvinistic. Work, suffer,
have twenty lashes a day, and you can have
a bowl of bean soup.
Diane*

Do not let me hear,

Of the wisdom of old men.
T. s. Eliott
But remember, also, young man: you are not
I
the first person who has ever been alone
and alone.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

In his History of the Russian Revolution Trotsky laid down three

conditions necessary for a successful seizure of power: "the ruling
classes, as a result of their practically manifested incapacity to get the

*A "twenty-seven-year-old journalist," in Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History

of the Great Depression.
°}'From "East Coker" in "Four Quartets" in COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1962 by T. S.
Eliot, © 1963 by Harcourt Brace Iovanovich, Inc. © 1963 by Faber and Faber Ltd. Re-
printed with permission of Harcourt Brace Iovanovich and Faber and Faber Ltd. 107
 country out of its blind alley, lose confidence in themselves"; the lower
classes develop "a bitter hostility to the existing order and a readiness
to venture upon the most heroic efforts and sacrifice in order to bring
the country out upon an upward road"; and "discontent of . . . inter-
mediate layers [roughly the middle classes], their disappointment with
the policy of the ruling class, their impatience and indignation, their
readiness to support a bold initiative on the part of the proletariat,
constitute the third political premise of a revolution."1

THE DEPRESSION AND COMMUNISM

During the Depression, America never came close to meeting these
conditions. Amid the panic following the economic crash in the fall
of 1929, only the capitalists fulfilled their historic mission by losing
faith in themselves and becoming, through their short-sighted eco-
nomic policies, their own gravediggers. The proletariat failed to show
any "bold initiative," while the American middle class remained as
timid and conservative as ever. There was much hopeful talk in the
left-wing press of "revolution," but those who actually went to the
masses found only misery and confusion. The montage that emerges
out of the photographic essays of Dorothea Lange, the reportage of
James Agee, the novels of John Steinbeck, Horace McCoy, and James T.
Farrell, and the microsociology of Helen and Robert Lynd makes a
haunting picture of people with blank faces and broken spirits, of
human bodies bent over like staring question marks. Watching the
bonus marches and bread lines, the starvation of rural migrant workers
and the dissolution of urban families, Americans became apprehensive.
Occasionally they grew angry and even violent, but just as often they
turned their resentment back upon themselves. For most Americans
felt the Depression as an individual, not a class experience, and, since
they considered unemployment a sign of personal failure, the idle hands
blamed not society but themselves. This was the "invisible scar" that
the Depression generation would bear almost the rest of its life.2 His-
torically, what was remarkable about the public during the Depression
was not the extent of its protest and sense of conflict but the extent of
its patience and sense of contrition.
The extent of this psychic wound indicates how much America's
108 working classes had absorbed the values of capitalist individualism.
 Had there been a viable Left in the 1920's propounding a socialist con-
sciousness among the workers, the story of radicalism in the 1930's
might have been different. Nevertheless, although the depression may
have vindicated DeLeon, American intellectuals also felt vindicated
as they watched Wall Street collapse like a house of cards. "To the
writers and artists of my generation," wrote Edmund Wilson, "who had
grown up in the Big Business era and had always resented its barbarism,
its crowding-out of everything they cared about, these years were not
depressing but stimulating. One couldn't help being exhilarated at the
sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a
new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power to find our-
selves still carrying on while the bankers, for a change, were taking a
beating."3
It is difficult to speak of the Old Left as a single generational entity.
The radicals of the thirties differed in age, ideology, social background,
cultural sensibility, life style, and political commitment. Among lit-
erary intellectuals alone there were at least three distinct groups. First
were the veteran radicals of the 1920's, a disparate band of intellectuals
who wrote on a variety of subjects for V. F. Calverton's Modem Quar-
terly. The isolated radical intelligentsia of the l920's also found a sound-
ing board in the New Masses, started in 1926 by its combative editor
Mike Gold. A heavy-handed polemicist, Gold loved to affect the un-
washed 111ie11 of the proletariat, and he relished chomping on foul,
three-cent Italian cigars and spitting profusely on the floor while he
denounced as "pansies" such writers as T. S. Eliot. A second circle of
radical writers rose to prominence in the early 1930's with the publica-
tion of Partisan Review. Considerably younger than veteran radicals
like Calverton and Eastman were such writers as Phillip Rahv, William
Phillips, Dwight Macdonald, and F. W. Dupee, the brilliant, college-
bred intelligentsia of the Depression. Urbane, steeped in modern litera-
ture and philosophy, these New York intellectuals had no illusions
about a proletarian cultural renaissance and refused to cast aside the
intellectual heritage of the recent past. A third group of writers who
were part of the Old Left were cultural refugees from the l920's. Novel-
ists and essayists like Iohn Dos Passos and Malcolm Cowley had been
110 survivors of the celebrated "lost generation" that had expatriated to
Europe to flee the emotional and esthetic sterility of America, "an old
bitch gone in the teeth" (Ezra Pound). Many of these exiles returned
with a feeling of guilty relief. In the 1920's they had turned inward
and lost themselves either in an abstruse cultivation of literary craft
or in a stylized search for personal salvation. Attempting to create new
values, some found in Hemingway's stoical characters a code of courage
that enabled man to endure a violent and absurd world and confront
the nothingness ("nada") of existence. Many emerged from the priva-
tized intellectual life of the twenties with a shameful sense of their
egotistical and ineffectual response to the alienation of bourgeois
existence. F. Scott Fitzgerald, reflecting with painful honesty upon
his own "crack-up," believed that his failure to develop a "political
conscience" was partly responsible for his loss of identity ("So there
was not an 'I' anymore"]. Fitzgerald's conviction that his own nervous
breakdown was symptomatic of America's social crisis revealed a strain
of guilt, felt by many writers, that their former lives had been shallow
and selfish-as the generation of the thirties had judged them. "I think
that my happiness, or my talent for self-delusion or what you will, was
an exception," confessed Fitzgerald. "It was not the natural thing but
the unnatural-unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience
parallels the wave of despair that swept over the nation when the Boom
was over."4
Fitzgerald's generation looked back upon the twenties as if it were
a joyless quest for joy. The fashionable despair of Eliot's The Waste Land
could not sustain the expatriates, and well before the Depression they
began to ache for a positive faith and a new social ethic. In contrast
to the earlier generation of Marxists, like Calverton and Gold and the
later generation of writers like Rahv and Phillips, the conversion of
America's lost generation to radicalism meant the end of a lonely cul-
tural odyssey and the beginning of a new political life. For the Old
Left in general, however, the appeals of communism are explained more
by the realities of the thirties than by the experience of the twenties.
The Depression sensitized intellectuals to life at the lower levels of
society. The misery of the unemployed and uprooted, the exploitation
of the blacks, and the desperate struggle of the workingman made cap-
italism all the more atrocious and communism all the more attractive. Ill
 F'li\ 63 and 64 A poster by Fred
Ellis, American radical artist
of the 1930's, depicts "two
civilizations"-America (left)
and the Soviet Union (facing
We% of page).
Iii

But the spectacle of human suffering did not in itself account for the
widespread radicalization of the American intelligentsia. Injustice
and exploitation had existed long before the Depression. The Depres-
sion made poverty more visible, but it was communism that made it
intolerable.
Central to the appeal of cornrnunisrn was the mighty image of Soviet
Russia. In the two years following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917,
the New York Times predicted, in ninety-one different editorials, the
collapse or near-collapse of Soviet communism. With the collapse of
western capitalism a decade later, the image of Russia changed dramat-
ically. As President Hoover seemed to lapse into a funk of indecision,
and Stalin celebrated the "success" of his Five-Year Plans, even indus-
112 trialists like Henry Ford and financiers like Thomas Lamont praised
Russia and advocated bestowing America's formal diplomatic recogni-
tion. To Left intellectuals especially, the young Soviet republic appeared
as a model of human brotherhood surrounded by a selfish and aggres-
sive capitalist world. The spectrum of admirers encompassed not only
the small American communist Left but the larger liberal Center as
well- fellow travelers who supported the idea of communism but did
not join the party, and Russian sympathizers who praised Soviet eco-
nomic achievements but rejected communist ideology. Only a few
zealous radicals believed that Soviet communism could be transplanted
to America and the Bolshevik Revolution duplicated. What the non-
communist Left wanted to borrow from Russia was the new and bold
idea of centralized economic planning. In the liberal New Republic
and Nation, and in the journals of the Left, an image emerged of a dy- 113
65 Eternal City, Peter Blume's allegory of fascism. Many saw communism as the only bul-
wark against the depicted threat of fascism.

namic country blazing with smoking factories and churning tractors

run by grim-jawed Russian men with enormous biceps and smiling
peasant girls with big, honest calves.
The contrast between Russia's highly propagandized economic prog-
ress and America's continued economic stagnation was one source of
communism's sway over the intellectual's imagination. Another was
the image of communism as the solitary bulwark against fascism. Hit-
ler's accession to power in January 1933 hardly troubled the CP, which
accepted the Comintern's judgment that fascism merely signified
capitalism's last stage. Yet fascism seemed so barbaric and irrational
that most intellectuals could only watch in stunned disbelief as "civil-
ized" Germany succumbed to it. While intellectuals pondered the fate
of western democracy, the communist press now claimed that the
triumph of the Nazis in Germany exposed the hollowness of liberalism
114 everywhere. Some discerning Marxists, like Sidney Hook and many of
the followers of Trotsky, rejected this argument. Yet the communist
interpretation carried great emotional appeal, for fascism symbolized
everything intellectuals hated: political demagogy, capitalist decadence,
militarism, and imperialism. Moreover, in analyzing the causes of
fascism, some liberal intellectuals found it difficult to admit that the
middle classes, previously regarded as the driving force of American
progressivism, comprised the social backbone of fascist movements.
The communist thesis that fascism evolved from "monopoly capital-
ism" was far more satisfying. But whether intellectuals saw fascism as
a plot of industrialists alone or as a popular mass movement, two con-
clusions could be drawn: that fascism could evolve from capitalism was
final proof that capitalism must be abolished; that fascism could
eliminate the Left in Europe was final proof that the Left in America
must organize against it. Organizing against it meant coming to terms
with the CP.
A third source of communism's strength in the 1930's was that byzan-
tine organization, the CPUSA-the Communist Party, U.S.A. In reality,
few intellectuals became official Party members because the CP de-
manded a loyalty that confused discipline with indoctrination, its
leaders frequently treated intellectuals with disdain, and its internal
doctrinal disputes often took on the arid flavor of medieval scholastic-
ism. Even so, intellectuals had to admit that the CP possessed an effec-
tive organization, offered a clear program of action, and enjoyed the
blessing of the Soviet Union. The CP's leadership may have been ruth-
less, but intellectuals saw the ruling classes as much more ruthless
and more dangerous. Cornbatting capitalism required more than sweet-
ness and light, and in the early thirties many writers, even those who
did not join, found in the CP a source of political strength and comrade-
ship with the mass of workers who possessed the means of overthrowing
the existing order. The playwright John Howard Lawson told Dos
Passos that though Mike Gold might call him a "bourgeois Hamlet,"
"my own plan is to work very closely with the communists in the future,
to get into some strike activity, and to accept a good deal of discipline
in doing so. It seems to me the only course open to people like our-
selves." "It is a bad world in which we live, and so even the revolu-
tionary movement is anything but what (poetically and philosophically 115
 speaking) it 'ought' to be," Granville Hicks was told in a letter from a
communist friend. "It seems nothing but grime and stink and sweat and
obscene noises and the language of beasts. But surely this is what
history is. It is just not made by gentlemen and scholars."5
Far more important than the CP was the influence of Marxism upon
American thinkers. Actually, most Left intellectuals were only "Marx-
ists of the heart," radicals who sensed that Marxism was right because
they knew that capitalism was wrong. But several serious scholars,
mainly those who wrote for the short-lived Marxist Quarterly, attempt-
ed to master Marxism as a philosophy of history and as a theory of
economics. In doing so they tried, significantly, to make Marxism com-
patible with America's intellectual tradition. The philosopher Sidney
Hook interpreted Marxism as a "radical humanism" that shared with
American pragmatism a common naturalistic theory of knowledge; the
historian Louis Hacker reinterpreted the American Revolution as a
study in imperialism and the Civil War as a class struggle; and the
social scientist Lewis Corey saw parallels in Marx's and Veblen's analy-
sis of class behavior.6 The attempt to make Marxism the logical ex-
tension of traditional progressive values may have set political theory
back fifty years. But Marxism did restore meaning and purpose to life
by offering a sense of historical direction, a method of class analysis,
and an organic vision that dared to be monistic. In an age when all
truths seemed relative and fragmentary, Marxism could provide a rare
glimpse of the totality of existence, an exciting synthesis that broke
down the classical dualisms between self and society, idealism and
realism, contemplation and action, art and life.
Ultimately Marxist communism appealed to intellectuals because,
as Daniel Aaron noted, "it seemed a science as well as an ethic, because
it explained and foretold as well as inspired."7 The overwhelming
desire of intellectuals to believe that history was on their side also
suggests the emotional value of Marxism for the generation of the
thirties. For Marxism resolved the contradictory tensions that lay at the
heart of the Old Left: professing a pragmatic devotion to William
]alnes's pluralistic universe, American radicals devoted themselves to
a Marxist world view that was fixed and predetermined; claiming to
116 have thrown off the sentimental idealism of the past, they embraced a
"realistic" doctrine demanding the idealism of sacrifice and commit-
ment; seeing themselves as men of ideas, they admired men of action;
believing in truth, they respected power. Clearly it was not the intellec-
tual content of Marxism that converted many American intellectuals to
radicalism. "It was not merely the power of ideology that bound one to
the Movement," recalled Irving Howe, who had taken to radicalism at
the adventurous age of fourteen:

No, what I think held young people to the Movement was the sense that they
had gained, not merely a "purpose" in life but, far more important, a co-
herent perspective upon everything that was happening to us. And this
perspective was something rather different from, a good deal more prac-
tical and immediate than, Marxist ideology; it meant the capacity for re-
sponding quickly and with a comforting assurance to events. The Move-
ment gave us a language of response and gesture, the security of a set
orientation-perhaps impossible to a political tendency that lacked an
ideology but not quite to be identified with ideology as such. It felt good
"to know." One revelled in the innocence and arrogance of knowledge, for
even in our inexpert hands Marxism could be a powerful analytic tool and
we could nurture the feeling that, whether other people realized it or not,
we enjoyed a privileged relationship to history. . . .
But there is a more fundamental reason for the appeal of the Movement.
Marxism involves a profoundly dramatic view of human experience. With
its stress upon inevitable conflicts, apocalyptic climaxes, ultimate mo-
ments, hours of doom, and shining tomorrows, it appealed deeply to our
imaginations. We felt that we were always on the rim of heroism, that the
mockery we might suffer at the moment would turn to vindication in the
future, that our loyalty tO principle would he rewarded by the grateful
masses of tomorrow. The principle of classic drama, peripeteia or the sud-
den reversal of fortune, we stood upon its head quite as Marx was supposed
to have done to Hegel; and then it became for us a crux of our political sys-
tem. The moment would come, our leaders kept assuring us and no doubt
themselves, if only we did not flinch, if only we were ready to remain a
tiny despised minority, if only we held firm to our sense of destiny. It was
this pattern of drama which made each moment of our participation seem
so rich with historical meaning.8

In contrast to the desperate need for a coherent orientation, the mood

of the earlier Left was far less anxious and far more confident. The
1913 Lyrical Left found in history what the Old Left could find only in
a visceral ideology. Before the war the exciting rise of socialism in the 117
 United States and in Europe enabled the young radicals to issue decla-
rations that rang with the certainty of truth. Moreover, for the most part
the Lyrical Left Was made up of humanitarians and pacifists, "tender"
radicals who knew nothing of the surreal world of totalitarianism and
terror that was to emerge in the l930's. Nor did the earlier radicals wit-
ness the decay of European social democracy into petrified party
bureaucracies, the bastardization of radical syndicalist ideas into fas-
cist ideologies, and the grotesque betrayals by Stalin. With its vague,
quasi-anarchist illusions and festive spirit, the Lyrical Left saw itself
standing at the dawn of a new era in which intellectuals at last could
live without compromising their devotion to truth, beauty, and justice.
The difference between the Lyrical Left and the Old Left is the dif-
ference between innocence and experience. To the radicals of the thir-
ties, the Depression may have first seemed like the beginning of "Ameri-
ca's October Revolution." But the unexpected triumph of fascism in
Europe caused them to reconsider the resiliency of capitalism and the
cunning nature of power. After 1935 few American radicals believed
that democratic socialism was the only historical alternative to capital-
ism. Still more chastening was the choice of comrades: since liberals in
America had failed to prevent the revival of corporate capitalism under
the New Deal, and since socialists in Europe had failed to prevent the
rise of fascism, the Old Left was presented with the cruel alternative of
Stalinism or fascism. Even the many writers who refused to accept this
myth of the false alternative realized that political choices were not
clear and easy. That the choice for and against liuinanity would in-
volve the trauma of deciding between two forms of totalitarianism, that
one would have to choose the bad against the worse, was an experience
almost unknown to the Lyrical Left.
The Old Left also differed from its predecessor in respect to social
background and intellectual orientation. The major figures of the
Lyrical Left, having been brought up in small towns in the midwest
or rural northeast, found much of their earlier inspiration in the native
legacy of cultural radicalism, especially in Thoreau's defiant individ-
ualism and Whitman's cosmic collectivism. The Old Left intellectuals,
rriany of Russian Iewish or east European ancestry, born in New York
118 City's ghettos, were more inclined to turn away from American in-
 NE W M AS SE S
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tellectual traditions and look elsewhere for an inspiring radical ideo-

logy. Marxism, which seemed so uniquely a product of the European
mind, emerged as a more natural ideology to the sons and daughters of
immigrants. The distinction between the two radical generations can
also be seen in the differences between the old Masses and the New
Masses. The former infused the Left with a hearty spirit of adventure
and innovation, the latter imbued it with an arid strain of dogrnatisrn.
Indeed, the New Masses attempted to burn out of the American Left
every vestige of its bohemian past. Two victims were Eastman (ironical- 119
 ly, "anti-bohemian" himself) and Floyd Dell, veterans of the Lyrical
Left. Eastman continued to argue that cultural freedom was the quintes-
sence of radicalism, and Dell continued to believe that radicalism could
be a sensual affair as well as a serious struggle. "When you go to
Russia," Dell asked a writer, "I hope you will write me about their new
sexual conventions in great detail." But New Masses editor Mike Gold
dismissed Eastman's concern for artistic freedom as a "Platonic" delu-
sion, while Dell's obsession with sex was that of a sick bourgeois intel-
lectual who "became the historian of the phallic-hunting girls of
Greenwich Village." Still the sybarite, Dell later remarked that in the
New Masses' cartoons "the women always had square breasts-which
seems to me to denote a puritanical and fanatical hatred of women as
the source of pleasure." Gold and Calverton refused to see, said Dell,
that sex for him was his "manumission from the bondage of a pre-
occupation with a Grand Economic Explanation of Everything, which
is rigor mortis to the mind."9
Compared to the sensuous emotions that animated the Lyrical Left,
the Old Left was driven by a sodden intensity born of the anxieties and
insecurities of the Depression. The strident ideological debates and
polemics merely reflected the fratricidal sectarianism of the period.
They also suggest a further contrast between the Lyrical Left and the
Old Left. To a large extent, the former was made up of rebels, the latter
o
of revolutionaries (or those who, under the spell of Marxism, briefly
saw themselves as revolutionaries). The rebel rises as an individual
in opposition to all sources of oppression; the revolutionary focuses all
his antagonisms upon one object and channels all his energy into one
movement. The rebel desires to assault traditional structure and
authority; the revolutionary desires to destroy in order to create a
specific new social order. The rebel has a Quixotic world view, skeptical
of "closed systems"; the revolutionary has an "organically" integrated
world view in which "totality" is everything (Georg Lukacs). And the
rebel, to borrow Arthur Koestler's useful distinction, has the capacity
to change causes; the revolutionary does not.10 Actually, few radicals
in the thirties were true' revolutionaries. Nevertheless, communist
doctrine did give them the illusion that they were revolutionaries ready
120 to storm the barricades when the hour of truth presented itself. Coni-
monism served to constrict the perspectives of radicalism and to con-
fine the intellectual's passion to a single cause. "Individual rebellion
has passed out of me," wrote Joseph Freeman, who made the transition
from the Lyrical to the Old Left, "and now I would like more than any-
thing else to be a disciplined worker in the movement."11 The revolu-
tionary movement became the great cause of the Old Left. When it
failed, many intellectuals who threw their bodies and souls into it
emerged, not merely disillusioned as in the case of the earlier Left, but
so bitter, exhausted, and guiltridden that they abandoned all causes.
To comprehend their retreat from radicalism requires a brief sketch of
the unhappy history of the Old Left.

THE POPULAR FRONT

Ideologically, the Old Left encompassed both socialism and commun-
ism, and the tensions that had earlier divided the two re-emerged in
the thirties. The socialists organized around the older Socialist Labor
Party and Socialist Party and the new American Workers Party. In 1934
the AWP was established to forge a radical movement independent of
both the SP and CP. Led by the Dutch-born preacher A. J. Muste, the
AWP refrained from dogmatic formulations of economic problems,
organized the unemployed in the small industrial towns of the Ohio
Valley, and attracted several independent radicals who wanted to avoid
repeating socialist and communist tactical mistakes. Meanwhile the
SLP continued to attack the reforrnisrn of the democratic socialists and
the centralism of the communists, thus remaining true to DeLeon and
as isolated as ever from the mainstream of American radicalism. The
SP itself could poll only 903,000 votes (2 percent of the total vote) when
it ran Norman Thomas for President in 1932. (Debs polled 6 percent in
1912). Moreover, the party was sick with factionalism. With a mem-
bership of roughly 15,000, the SP was made up of older Jewish trade
union leaders, a small core of Protestant pacifists, and young students
who formed the League for Industrial Democracy. The younger mili-
tants often sided with Thomas and challenged the leadership of old-
guard socialists like Hillquit. Aside from internal difficulties, the SP
faced two new challenges in the thirties: the gradual winning over of 121
 workers in the coal mines, steel mills, and clothing factories by the New
Deal's labor reforms; and the seductiveness of the wealth-sharing pana-
ceas of Dr. Francis Townsend, Huey Long, and Upton Sinclair.
To the Left intellectuals, democratic socialism seemed stale and
timid. "Becoming a socialist right now," wrote Dos Passos in 1932,
"would have just about the same effect on anybody as drinking a bottle
of near-beer."12 To intellectuals who wanted a party more audacious
than the SP but not quite as centralized as the CP, the only choices were
two communist splinter groups whose influence among radical writers
was perhaps the one consolation of their lonely isolation. The Love-
stonites and the Trotskyists, both expelled from the CP in the l920's,
still regarded themselves as the only genuine communists in America.
The former group, led by lay Lovestone, Bertram D. Wolfe, and Will

67 Socialist Party presidential nominee Norman Thomas campaigns in Philadelphia

in 1932, when the party won 2 percent of the vote.

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He Dome
I-Ierberg, was often called the CP of the Right Opposition, just as the lat-
ter, led by James P. Cannon, lames Burnham, and Max Schactman,
called itself the CP of the Left Opposition. After failing to win the
Comintern's endorsement in 1929, the Lovestonites continued to stress
their conservative thesis of "American exceptionalism," which criti-
cized communists for applying Marxist-Leninist ideas mechanically to
the peculiar conditions of America instead of creatively adapting them.
Sharing with the Lovestonites an opposition to Stalinism, the Trotsky-
ists claimed that only they represented the true Left, and that therefore
they, the real Leninist revolutionaries, would soon displace the official
CP and reconstitute a new, authentic party and a new Communist In-
ternational. Although these two opposition factions had together less
than a thousand members, the Lovestonites' Workers Age and the Trot-
skyists' New International gave the Left a variety of refreshing and
usually discerning viewpoints. Later in the thirties the Trotskyists won
increasing support among several literary intellectuals who could no
longer tolerate the Comintern-dominated The Communist and the CP's
Daily Worker.
In the early thirties, however, the communists commanded most
attention. In 1932 the League of Professional Groups published Culture
and Crisis, calling upon writers, doctors, scientists, artists, and teachers
to vote for William z. Foster and James Ford, the presidential candidates
of the CP. Those who heaped contempt upon the reformist SP and gave
their allegiance to the revolutionary CP included many of America's
most notable writers and scholars. What originally attracted intellectu-
als to communism was the confidence and aggressiveness of the CP,
now intoxicated by the so-called "third period" of the international com-
munist movement (the first, 1919-21, witnessed the abortive commun-
ist insurrections in Hungary and Bavaria; the second, 1922-28, saw
Russia acknowledging the stabilization of world capitalism and making
friendly diplomatic overtures to the West). The policy of the third per-
iod fitted the mood of the early Depression, for it asserted that the
time for a revolutionary offensive had now been reached in the develop-
ment of world capitalism. This new strategy caused the CP to shift
tactics on the labor question. Previously the CP had accepted the
Comintern's judgment that the development of a radical consciousness 123
68 Police and Teamsters Union strikers clash in Minneapolis in a scene that became increas-
ingly familiar during the Depression years. The American Trotskyists, although small in
number, had some ihfluence in the Teamsters Union.

among American workers would be slow. Now the CP reversed itself

and made every effort to penetrate and capture the labor movement by
taking over strikes wherever possible, and, after the economic crash, by
setting up unemployment councils and again instructing each of its
members to "turn his face to the factory. '! The CP also launched a
policy of dual unionism, under which, as the Depression deepened,
rival communist unions or locals were established in clothing, textile,
coal, tool and die, restaurant, shoe, and automobile industries. Later,
when John L. Lewis broke from the AFL in 1936 and formed the CIO,
communists were able to move in on the ground floor and establish a
base in more than a dozen CIO affiliates, including the strategic long-
shore, maritime, and transport unions.
It is enormously difficult to ascertain the exact influence of the CP
in the labor movement during the Depression. The New Left historian
124 Staughton Lynd has recorded the glowing recollections of several CIO
veterans praising the organizational efforts of communists. The more
thorough research of Theodore Draper, however, suggests the limita-
tions of communist influence on labor in general. The CP, for example,
made an all-out effort to win over southern textile workers and miners
in the brutal strikes at Gastonia, North Carolina, and in Harlan Coun-
ty, Kentucky. But the failure of these poorly organized, ill-timed strikes
was a calamity for the workers, who, always suspicious of the "atheis-
tic" doctrines of communism, became openly hostile to any further
efforts at communist infiltration. Nevertheless, communists who en-
tered the South were the first to risk their lives attempting to expose
the appalling poverty and working conditions, and they succeeded in
gaining the support of a number of important intellectuals, including
the novelists Theodore Dreiser and Iohn Dos Passos, who publicized to
the nation the desperate plight of the southern workers.15
Energy and determination brought success to the communists. The
organization men of the American Left, communists were always avail-
able to hand out leaflets on bitter cold mornings, to sit out dreary meet-
ings until they had won their point, never shirking the boring, dirty
work of radicalism. Perhaps the one potential ally the communists

69 Strildng textile workers demonstrate at Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929.

¢
 failed to organize was the black American. The painful economic dis
tress of the Depression made the black American receptive to radical
ism, and black writers like W. E. B. DuBois and George Padmore had
read enough Marx to show their brothers that racial suppression and
economic exploitation were related phenomena. But the CP failed to
arouse a mass movement of black workers and intellectuals because of
three strategic errors. First was its formulation of the "Black Belt" doc
trine, which, in its attempt to keep the class question separate from
the color question, proposed a separate "Negro republic" in the South
a move that scarcely met the immediate needs of black Americans.
Second was its expedient handling of the Scottsboro trials of nine black
youths falsely accused of rape, which offended the NAACP and other
black groups. And third was its defense of the Soviet Union's policy
of supplying oil to fascist Italy during the Ethiopian War despite
black protests. 14
Communists enjoyed more success with young Americans. During
the Depression, youths suffered great hardships. Almost one-third
could not find w.ork, and those from lower-income families had to quit
school to make ends meet at home. Even those who managed to graduate
from college found themselves a "locked-out" generation, an unwanted

is

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V011
I

I'0~w L

70 A comment on
Southern racial op-
pression in the Daily
Worker of 1927. The
gun-carrying low-class
white says: "You can't
vote, her too ignorant."

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..\
intelligentsia who were glad to find work anywhere, even digging
ditches on a government Works Progress Administration project-a
sight that could both delight and sadden hardened laborers. One col-
lege newspaper celebrated its graduating class in an "Ode to Higher
Education":

I sing in praise of college

Of M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s I
But in pursuit of knowledge
We are starving by degrees.l5

The most important radical youth organizations were the Young

Communist League and its campus counterpart the National Student
League, which had thriving branches at City College, Brooklyn College,
and Hunter College (all New York City schools), the University of
Chicago and the University of Wisconsin, and, on the west coast, Ber-
keley and the University of California, Los Angeles. After visiting
campuses, even conservative critics in Congress were forced to admit
what most professors knew all along: that YCL members were often
the brightest and most articulate students. Young activists fought
for academic freedom, raised funds for striking coal miners, rushed to
the defense of dismissed radical professors, and, while college presi-
dents fretted over continued support of wealthy benefactors, talked
of bringing the class struggle into the classroom. Communists also
participated in the upsurge of pacifism among students of the thirties.
The greatest display of solidarity occurred on April 13, 1934, when in
New York City alone between 15,000 and 25,000 students walked out of
their ll:00 A.M. classes in a massive antiwar strike (estimates for the
entire country varied between 500,000 and l,000,000) .
For the sensitive young, becoming a communist could mean both
a painful and an exhilarating break with parents and relatives. One
father, H. Bedford-Jones, published an article in the conservative
magazine Liberty under the hair-raising title, "Will Communists Get
Our Girls in College?" claiming he had learned from his daughter how
shaggy radicals seduced and subverted innocent coeds. The following
week the New Masses responded with an article by the daughter of
Bedford-Jones, "My Father Is a Liar!"16 127
 The CP, which in the twenties had its roots in the immigrant work-
ing classes, began reaching out to other sections of American society
in the thirties. The results of its recruitment drives were remarkable.
Membership rose from 7500 in 1930 to 55,000 in 1938, with perhaps
30,000 more unregistered members in various youth groups and trade
unions.17 The skill and ability with which communists carried out
organizational campaigns is not the only explanation for their success.
Equally important was the new strategy of the Popular Front, which
replaced the disastrous policies of the third period, described above.
The heady expectations of the third period rested largely on the theory
of "social fascism," a notion first developed in the early 1920's by
European communists in an effort to undermine the social democrats
in Germany and elsewhere. In accordance with this thesis communists
were instructed to turn "class against class" so that in the end only two
classes (the proletariat and the bourgeoisie) would confront one another
in mortal combat. In order to discredit liberals and socialists, the CP
tool< the position that all those who were not communists were class
enemies and that liberal-social democracy and fascism were expres-
sions of the same repressive bourgeois state, the only difference being
that the former was "masked" and the latter "naked." In Germany,
communists thus scorned the socialists' attempt to oppose Hitler's
maneuver to power, and in the United States communists attacked
Norman Thomas and President Roosevelt as "social fascists." The corn-
munist strategy presumed that fascism reflected capitalism's "final
crisis/'; hence, whatever tactic would expedite Hitler's advent to power
was a victory for communism ("After Hitler, Our Turn!").18 But when
Hitler consolidated power and made it clear that fascism was anything
but a transitory phenomenon, and when Roosevelt seemed able to sal-
vage American capitalism, the theory of social fascism had to be
abandoned. Instead of predicting fascism's imminent collapse, com-
munists now described it as an imminent threat. The USSR responded
by joining the League of Nations and signing a mutual defense pact
with France, and the Cornintern announced the new policy of the
Popular Front.
The Popular Front of 1935 represented a complete volte face. Whereas
128 the CP previously had insisted on class struggle, it now called for
collaboration with the bourgeoisie. It had formerly exalted the Soviet
system of government; now it extolled the virtues of American de-
mocracy. It once had preached internationalism; now it praised nation-
alism. American communists embraced the new course without so
much as a blush of embarrassment, hailing socialists as fellow com-
rades and praising Roosevelt as an enlightened statesman. Communists
now became respectable, and the CP began to seem like an evangelical
church that opened its door to all believers. The attempt to make
communism into "Twentieth Century Americanism" also meant that
the less acrid works of Iefferson, Lincoln, and Thomas Paine had to be
stressed over Marxist-Leninist writings. At CP meetings the stars and
stripes could be seen above the red Hag- Patriotism, the refuge of
scoundrels, became the haven of Stalinists. Even young communists
sounded like clean-cut all-Americans:

Some people have the idea that a YCLer is politically minded, that nothing
outside politics means anything. Gosh no. They have a few simple prob-
lems. There is the problem of getting good men on the baseball team, of
dating girls, etc. We go to shows, parties, dances, and all that. In short, the
YCL and its members are no different from other people except that we
believe in dialectical materialism as a solution to all problems.19
The Popular Front had immense appeal to many elements of the
noncommunist Left, especially to liberals who had always urged a com-
mon front against fascism and who found themselves in the mid-thir-
ties without a viable ideology. By blurring the distinction between
Marxism and progressivism and by do-emphasizing revolution, the
Popular Front also gave liberals the impression that they had con-
vinced communists to come to their collective senses. Speaking of CP
members, Upton Sinclair boasted: "I do not mean to be egotistical and
imply that they have taken my advice, but it is a fact that they are now
saying and doing what I urged them for many years to say and do- to
support and cooperate with the democratic peoples."20
Caught up in the spirit of the Popular Front, much of the American
Left accepted the Stalinist interpretation of two momentous events that
began in 1936: the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow Purge trials.
Approximately 3200 Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
to fight for the imperiled Spanish republic. The choice of Lincoln's 129
 71 Guernica (1937) , Picasso's famous expression of the anguish of his homeland under

name was typical of the Popular Front strategy, for to the Stalinists it
signaled that the duty of American volunteers was to preserve the
republic, not to turn the war into a social revolution. At the same time,
however, the real forces of the Left in Spain were the Trotskyists
(POUM), and especially the anarchists, who were establishing collective
farms and workers' councils in an attempt to transform the civil war
into a genuine revolution. But the Comintern, possibly fearing that a
revolutionary Spain would arouse the wrath of western nations, ordered
Spanish communists to put down a popular uprising in Barcelona and
to liquidate several anarchist leaders. In the United States only a hand-
full of isolated anti-Stalinists publicized the repression. Dos Passos,
130 one of the few literary intellectuals to take a stand, broke with his close
Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

friend Hemingway and declared that a crime is a crime whether com-

mitted by the Left or Right."
While news from Spain upset a few radical intellectuals, reports from
Moscow convulsed the entire Left. Stalin's systematic purge of thou-
sands of former bolshevik leaders, some of them heroes in the eyes of
American radicals, remains one of the most enigmatic episodes in the
twentieth century. Branded as traitors or fascist agents, the accused often
confessed in open court to crimes they could not possibly have com-
mitted. They did so knowing a firing squad awaited them no matter
how they pleaded. From 1936 to 1938 the American Left was stunned
by the eerie proceedings. Most socialists, suspicious as ever of Stalin,
denounced the trials; and the Trotskyists, fearing a bloodbath against 131
72 Three of the more than 3000 Americans who made up the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
which fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. From left, Iohn Gates, Robert
Thompson, and Dave Doran. Thompson's death in 1965 sparked a controversy over whether a
communist- though a Second World War hero-could be buried in Arlington National
Cemetery.
anti-Stalinists everywhere, sought to expose the farce. Trotskyists in
America succeeded in gaining the support of philosopher John Dewey,
who headed a commission of inquiry that went to Mexico to obtain
from the exiled Trotsky testimony with which to conduct a "counter-
trial" outside the USSR. But when the commission defended Trotsky
and published the book Not Guilty, a storm of controversy erupted. Im-
mediately 150 "American Progressives" signed a statement supporting
the Moscow trials. Although motives were complex and varied, those
intellectuals who condoned the trials generally feared the collapse of the
Popular Front. In their minds Trotsky preached world revolution, class
struggle, and opposition to democracy; hence it was Stalin's enemies
who played into the hands of the fascists, undermined the strength of
the Soviet Union, and thereby endangered a united front on the Left.
But even those communists who opposed the Popular Front justified the
purges by appealing to the goddess of history. Citing the political trials
132 that occurred during the French Revolution, Jay Lovestone concluded:
"In effect, we practically ignore the charges, refutations and counter-
charges, and ask ourselves: Which tendency was carrying forward the
interests of the revolution and which was obstructing it? Some may be
shocked at this utterly 'unlnoral' approach but it seems to be the as
poach of history!"22
A few years later, after an alleged Stalinist agent in Mexico killed the
heavily guarded Trotsky with an ice-ax, embittered American Trot-
skyists accused other radicals of supporting Stalin because he had
power while Trotsky had only the most brilliant mind of the century.
Had radical intellectuals admitted the monstrous hoax of the show
trials, they would have had to question the moral distinction between
communism and fascism and admit that truth was no longer the virtue
of the Left. "One of the worst drawbacks of being a Stalinist at the
present time," wrote Edmund Wilson in 1937, "is that you have to de-
fend so many falsehoods." "lt is difficult for me to believe that you
entered an alliance with fascism," Waldo Frank complained to Trotsky,
"but it is equally difficult for me to believe that Stalin carried out such
horrible frame-ups." To concede the terror of the trials required an ad-

73 Leon Trotsky, dead in a

Mexico City hospital after an
attack by a presumed agent of
Joseph Stalin.
mission of One's own naiveté for having believed that Marxism would
somehow solve the problem of human aggression. With excruciating
self~analysis, Frank later asked: "Could the vision within Marxism not
be deepened? Not be made true? This was my hope, and my strategy. In
my journal of those days I wrote: 'I collaborate with the revolutionists
not expecting them to understand me: the bad logic of their dogmatic
empiricism prevents that. But I must serve and understand them; and
part of my service is to let them exploit me."' Years afterwards, some
Left intellectuals would justify their support of Stalin on the grounds
that Hitler was the greater threat and Stalin the only ruler willing and
able to crush the Third Reich. Even so, those who remained silent
emerged from the decade with a conscience as pained as it was penitenti-
al. Reflecting on the private doubts, which he confided to a notebook
rather than publish, Malcolm Cowley confessed: "That failure to pub-
lish led me into false situations, and later I would suffer for it-
deservedly, I say to myself in private reckonings. When I add together
these various sins of silence, self-protectiveness, inadequacy, and
something close to moral cowardice, there appears to be reason for my
feeling a sense of guilt about the second half of the decade."23
Thus, the Moscow trials created a crisis of conscience for the Ameri-
can Left. Although many could not bear the burden of truth, a number

74 and 75 Malcolm Cowley (left) and Granville Hicks (right) two of many Left
intellectuals who repressed their doubts concerning the Soviet Union until late in
the l930's.
?"\
IE'
i
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i
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c

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.,I
A`-

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I
 "THE MAROONED MAROON"
a l i i i l l l l l l l l i

76 The Washington Post com-

ments on the position of the Ameri-
can Communist Party in 1939. The
communists, betrayed by the sign-
ing of the Russo-German nonag-
gression pact, were at the same time
harassed by the House Un-A1neri-
can Activities Committee (the
"Dies" Committee).

of important writers broke with the Popular Front and publicly con-
demned the Soviet government. Anti-Stalinist intellectuals formed the
Committee for Cultural Freedom to protest the suppression of civil
liberty in Russia as well as in Germany. While scholars began to apply
the new term "totalitarian" to Russia along with Germany, Trotskyists
debated whether Stalin's Russia could in any sense be considered a
"workers' state," and, if not, whether they were obligated to defend it
in case of war or adopt a policy of "revolutionary defeatism."9/* Stalin
himself resolved the issue when the Soviet Union, on August 24, 1939,
announced a neutrality and non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.
To wavering fellow travelers, the pact came as the final blow. Even
communists, who might view the expedient maneuver as Stalin's ans-
wer to the Munich settlement, were shocked when they realized the
Kremlin had given no hint of the negotiations. Thousands of members
now left the CP, shaken by the thought that communism no less than
fascism meant the end of morality in politics. During the height of the
Popular Front, Russia stood for all that was good, rational, and progres-
sive, and Germany for all that was evil, barbaric, and reactionary. The
Nazi-Soviet pact killed the dream and, as W. H. Auden expressed it,
"the clever hopes expired of a low dishonest decade." Granville Hicks, 135
 an influential critic and literary editor of the New Masses, received a
letter from a young woman protesting his resignation from the CP
shortly after the pact:

So it all comes to this: that your whole life previous to this time, all you
underwent for the party, all the privations you seem willingly to have suf-
fered when you could have had any post you wanted anywhere ill the coun-
try, all this has gone up in a puff of smoke and lost its meaning. What for?
You might just as well have taken it nice and easy and saved yourself the
trouble. It might just as well never have happened. What a pity, to find
one's life without meaning. What is left for you now?25

THE CRITIQUE OF MARXISM: LEGACY OF THE

OLD LEFT
Finding their lives emptied of meaning, some radicals of the l930's
felt an overriding urge to come to grips with their past. A few intellec-
tuals wrote novels or autobiographies in the hope that political truth
might be generalized from personal experience. Most writers began to
re-examine the faiths that had originally nourished and sustained their
radicalism. In the process, Old Left intellectuals subjected Marxism to
a critique in every area of human knowledge, and from their reconsider-
ations arose a new outlook toward the nature of American society and
the nature of man.

Sociology: From Marx to Tocqueville

In the 1920's American intellectuals condemned capitalism on moral
grounds. The despair with which many writers fled America's business
culture merely revealed that few questioned the efficacy and durability
of the free-enterprise system. In the thirties, however, capitalism was
attacked not primarily because it was immoral but because it was irra-
tional. Influenced by the Marxist theory of the inevitable clash of social
classes, many writers believed they were witnessing the death agony of
the old order as described in Das Kapital: Capitalists, in a frenzy of
irrational competition, introduce labor-saving machinery and reduce
further the workers' wages and buying power. As profits continue to
shrink, unemployment rises, underconsumption spreads, small busi-
136 nesses go under, and, while the few remaining industrialists blindly
continue to produce, the middle class realizes who its enemy is as it
descends "gradually into the proletariat." After a series of worsening
crises, "centralization of the means of production and socialization of
labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their
capitalist integument. This integument bursts asunder, The knell of
capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expro-
priated."26
The idea that capitalism was prey to its own "contradictions" led
Marxists to engage in an unrelieved dialogue on "inevitability." The
dialogue was questioned when the collapse of capitalism failed to des-
troy the bourgeoisie and produce a polarization of classes in America.
In The Crisis of the Middle Class (1935), Marxist Lewis Corey per-
ceptively described the condition of the "petit bourgeoisie" ; but as Corey
would later admit, the old bourgeois stratum of small, victimized entre-
preneurs declined only to be replaced by a "new middle class" of indus
trial technicians and middle-management employees. Gradually intel-
lectuals began to sense that the "objective" concept of class, which
viewed the worker only in his relation to the means of production, must
be modified by an analysis of the worker's self-image in relation to his
social and professional role. Anxieties about status helped explain why
the "new middle class" would remain conservative and why the
déclassé citizen could never bring himself to identify with the prole-
tariat, as Marx had assumed. Moreover, when America failed to gravi-
tate into two warring camps, Left intellectuals began to analyze the
historical sources of A.tnerica's peculiar social structure and value sys-
tem in a search for the factors that had prevented the development of
class consciousness. The key appeared to be in the writings of Alexis de
Tocqueville, who a century earlier had described America as a homogen-
ized and integrated social order where "equality of condition" was both
an ideal and a reality. After the Second World War, ex-Marxist so-
ciologists like Max Lerner and Seymour Martin Lipset would describe
America as an "open class society" that was dynamic and mobile, bound
together by common beliefs and values rooted in economic individual-
ism and social conformity. This new outlook toward American society
marked a dramatic shift from Marx's theory of class struggle and ec-
onomic oppression imposed from above to Tocqueville's theory of class 137
 diffusion and self-imposed social repression. In American sociology
the concepts of status and consensus replaced those of class and con-
flict.27

Economics: From Marx to Keynes

If American society confounded Marxism, so did Franklin D. Roose-
velt. It was the New Deal that gave hope to the American middle class
and rescued capitalism from the cyclical manifestation of its death
instinct. Roosevelt's programs failed to relieve the massive unemploy-
ment and revive the shaky economy-only the Second World War
would bring about the huge government spending that restored stability
-but the New Deal, with its social security measures and its recogni-
tion of labor's right to collective bargaining, eased the discontent of the
lower and middle working classes. To the Left, the New Deal at first
appeared a futile and chaotic experiment in class collaboration. The
idea that a government could rise above the interests of the ruling
class and respond to the pressures of organized labor and the majority
of citizens (if not to the needs of the unorganized poor and forgotten
minorities) was alien to the communist concept of the state. The Left
also feared that the Roosevelt administration would be dominated by
monopoly capitalists who would gradually transform America into a
fascist corporate state. But Roosevelt's ability to steer a middle course
between capitalist exploitation and socialist expropriation, while at the
same time preserving traditional democratic institutions, seemed more
attractive to disillusioned radicals who found a new respect for the poli-
tics of moderation as they watched the politics of extremism in Germany
and Russia.
During the Second World War, moreover, even anticapitalist intel-
lectuals were impressed by the great productive capacity of American
enterprise, which was now being harnessed to destroy the awesome
industrial might of Adolph Krupp and the Third Reich. After the war
no one could speak of America's economy as irrational or contradictory
in the realm of production. Yet instead of going beyond Marxism to a
moral criticism of capitalism, some ex-radicals became fascinated by
the governmenbspending policies of Keynesian economics and all but
138 mesmerized by the magic of industrial growth. They now believed that
 77 Passersby in a New
York City street stare at
an early NRA poster.
The sight soon became
commonplace through-
out the nation.

78 Street-widening by the WPA during the Depression, one of the agency's many and varied
programs.

pRoGRQ
 the old socialist goal of equality could be ignored, since wealth no
longer had to be redistributed but merely expanded. "There are no prob-
lems on the side of depression with which the American economy and
polity cannot, if it must, contend," wrote John Kenneth Galbraith in
1952. "This change in western political life," wrote Lipset in reference
to the "end of ideology," which supposedly accompanied the advent of
abundance, "reflects the fact that the fundamental political problems of
the industrial revolution have been solved." The idea that a progressive
increase in aggregate income would lessen the harsh contrast between
rich and poor is a doctrine as old as Daniel Webster. Postwar intellec-
tuals understood that an obsession with gross national product had con-
servative implications, and many liberal Keynesians called for struc-
tural and social reforms. Yet it was hard to deny that the spectacle of
affluence had replaced the specter of scarcity, making consumption the
new opiate of the people. Werner Sombart's "melancholy" predictions at
the turn of the century, made in his book Why Is There No Socialism
in the United States? seemed to be coming true: "On the reefs of roast
beef and apple pie socialistic utopias of every society are sent to their
d00m."28

Political Science: From Marx to Madison

The Old Left believed communism would resolve not only the prob-
lem of justice and equality but also the problem of power. The idea of
a classless society implied that political power would be democratized
as economic power was collectivized. But in Russia, the state, which
Marx once called "the executive committee of the ruling class," failed to
"wither away" even though the ruling classes had long been destroyed.
The re-emergence of despotic power under Stalin puzzled the Old Left,
and younger radicals, especially the Trotskyists, felt the need to go be-
yond orthodox Marxism to reconsider the elusive character of political
power and to study the unanticipated phenomenon of postrevolutionary
bureaucracy. The earlier writings of Italian elitist theorists like Vil-
fredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca and the gloomy meditations of Max
Weber haunted American intellectuals as they considered the prospect
that oligarchy could emerge in all forms of modern society. Drawing
140 upon these sources, lames Burnham claimed to demonstrate the impos-
stability of democracy and the inevitability of a ruling class. The new
ruling class, he argued, would be not the capitalists but the managerial-
ists-the technicians and administrators who, by virtue of their essen-
tial skills, had assumed control over the means of production.29
To a large extent the deradicalization of intellectuals was a result of
the impact of European totalitarianism upon American political
thought. Stalinism was the mystery and the terror of the Old Left. In
contrast to fascism, Stalinism could 110t be explained as a product of
either monopoly capital or middle-class decadence. Unlike Hitler,
Stalin was not the creator but the creation of a political system no one
had foreseen. In the face of Soviet totalitarianism, American intellec-
tuals began to reconsider the classical conservative argument against
the monolithic state. Former radical students of politics like Martin
Diamond and Iohn P. Roche soon rejected Marx's theory of class con-
flict and rediscovered Madison's theory of factional conflict. The notion
that democracy could be sustained only by a conflict among counter-
vailing interest groups came to be known as liberal pluralism in the
1950's.
If Stalinism made former radicals fearful of centralization, fascism
made them fearful of rampant egalitarianism. The paradox of fascism
was that the more elitist and ruthless the regime became, the more
popular it was in the eyes of the nation. As political scientists studied
Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany they began to sense that popu-
lar consent itself was inadequate to preserve democracy. Eventually
a suspicion of mass movements in general developed, perhaps best
expressed in Eric Hoffer's widely acclaimed The True Believer (1951)
and in Walter Lippmann's The Public Philosophy (1955). A few polit-
ical sociologists, like the former radical Lipset, even began to explore
the forbidden subject of "working class authoritarianism." Having
lost faith in the masses as the carriers of democratic values, social sci-
entists in the 1950's could speak frankly of the positive benefits of public
apathy. Mass involvement in politics and democratic participation in
decision malting became suspect to writers like Burnham, who believed
that freedom must rest upon institutional foundations. Even more sus-
pect was the role of theory in politics. The reaction against the revolu-
tionary ideologies of communism and fascism became a reaction against 141
 normative theory in general. The foundations of pluralism, Daniel I

Bell declared in explaining the failure of American socialism, rest on

the "separation of ethics and politics." Those who tried to infuse politics
with morality in order to transcend pluralism failed to heed Weber's
dictum: "He who seeks the salvation of souls, his own as well as others,
should not seen it along the avenue of politics."3Q

Theology: From Marx to Kierkegaard

After the Second World War, conscience politics did survive in one
area- theology. Yet even here one finds a retreat from radicalism and a
rejection of Marxism for the psychology of the soul. Former radicals
like Reinhold Niebuhr and Will Heiberg came to the conclusion that
Marxism failed because it could not transcend the limitations of
bourgeois culture. Marxism arose as a reaction to nineteenth~century
liberalism, but it also absorbed liberalism's illusions about the ration-
ality of man, the cult of technology, and the progressive nature of
history. A millennialistic philosophy, Marxism placed the Kingdom
of God in history and thereby falsely lifted the spiritual burden of
freedom from the conscience of mankind. "History cannot solve our
problems," wrote I-Ierberg; "history is itself the problem." Above all,
Marxism had rendered the Left oblivious to the ambiguities and cor-
ruptions of power. Private property is not the root of all evil; property
is "not the cause but the instrument of human egotism," maintained
Niebuhr. The human drive for power, as Hawthorne had pointed out
a century earlier, is deeply rooted in the contradictory nature of man. 31
The horrors of totalitarianism and the fallacies of liberalism drove
theologians like Niebuhr and Herberg to develop a new theory of free-
dom that red ected Marx's world of social action for Kierkegaard's world
of moral "inwardness." "An>dety," declared Kierkegaard, "is the dizzi-
ness of freedom." In the inner dialogue of private conscience, freedom
means anxiety because freedom requires making decisions in which all
choices are finite, tragic, and guilt-ridden. In the teeth of liberal rela-
tivism and Marxist determinism, this existential definition of the
authentically free man makes the individual the source of moral will
and value judgment. Yet the tense strain of paradox and irony in
142 Niebuhr's and Herber's Christian existentialism undermined the
79 and 80 Reinhold Niebuhr (left) and Will Heiberg (right), two radical theolo-
gians who ultimately rejected Marxism.

utopian, millennialistic ethos of Marxism and deprived the Left of its

worldly quest for paradise regained. Man had a moral duty to struggle
for social justice but, fallen, could never escape the stain of sin and
achieve self-transcendence. Significantly, the theologians' view of
human nature led to the same political conclusions reached by the
pluralists in social science. Both stressed the negative concept of free-
dom that called for restraints upon man's egotism. Thus the roost de-
mocracy could achieve, given the dual nature of man, was balanced
conflict and equilibrated power. "Man's capacity for justice makes
democracy possible," observed Niebuhr; "but man's inclination to
injustice makes democracy necessary." By tempering radical hopes
with conservative fears, ex-Marxists like Niebuhr and I-Ierberg gave
America a theology of crisis that strengthened the fiber of American
liberalism and strangled the millenialistic myths of American rad-
icalism.32

Literature: Prom Marx to Melville

The controversy over proletarian realism in the thirties divided party
Marxists from learned humanists and classicists and eventually de-
rnoralized the literary Left. Briefly, Marxists argued that all literature
is a reflection of socioeconomic relations, and, since the class struggle
is the core of human existence, the life of the proletariat is the proper 143
 subject of art. Maintaining that most literature of the past represented
an escape into bourgeois sentimentality or philosophical pessimism,
the Marxists insisted that literature must lead to action rather than
contemplation. Ignoring the fact that neither Marx nor Engels dared
to lay down canons of literary theory, and ignoring Trotsky's observa-
tion that the proletariat was too "temporary and transient" to create
its own culture, some American Marxists imposed formulas that re-
duced literature to a branch of sociology and made art into a crude
class weapon. The result was a hack literature, mechanical in flow
and metallic in flavor.
Most independent radical writers eventually rejected the monotony
of proletarian realism. The tension between literary creativity and
political dedication troubled learned Partisan Review critics like
Phillips and Rahv, who refused to treat art as propaganda and to con-
fine the literary imagination to political orthodoxy.33 One result of
the Old Left's repudiation of proletarian literature was a rediscovery
of the value and integrity of American literature. In the 1920's writers
had tended to look beyond provincial America for subject matter; and in
the 1930's, Marxism reinforced the writers' conviction that the answer
to America's social and cultural problems could be found only in Eu-
rope. The ideologies of Stalinism and fascism, however, discredited
the appeal of European ideas, and the relativism of Marxism and
Freudianism, which rendered absolute value judgments untenable,
seemed to leave humanist intellectuals without solid principles on
which to make a moral stand against Hitler. With the outbreak of the
war, moreover, and with the influx of Europe's intellectual refugees,
American writers came to feel that somehow their own fate and that
of the rest of the world were inseparable from America's experience
and destiny. No longer able to look to Europe as a cultural sanctuary
or as a fount of political wisdom, literary critics now believed they
could find a new, deeper strength and higher awareness in the classical
works of Hawthorne, Whitman, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and, above
all, Melville-"the most plumbed and 'proplletic' of American writers,"
observed Louis Kronenberger. After the war the literary intellectuals'
reconciliation with America reached a climax in 1952, when the Parti-
144 san Review published the symposium, "Our Country and Our Culture."
Actually the curious pattern of radical exhaustion and nationalistic
celebration had been foreshadowed ten years earlier in Alfred Kazin's
On Native Grounds, which marked the beginning of the Left's return
home. The final chapter, "Americal America!" opens with a remark
by Abigail Adams to Iohn Adams: "Do you know that European birds
have not half the melody of ours?"5"4

American History: From Marx to Locke

The study of the American past followed somewhat the same pattern.
American historians like Hacker also abandoned European Marxism
in order to rediscover America. Unlike literary critics, however, histori-
cal scholars could scarcely return to the writings of classical American
historians, none of whom, with the exception of Henry Adams, had
envisioned the terrors of the twentieth century. Indeed, postwar his-
torians even felt impelled to reject recent progressive historiography,
which had depicted the American experience as a moral battleground
between the forces of industrialism and agrarianism, capitalism and
democracy, realism and idealism. Whereas literary intellectuals found
in Melville and James a rich and complex vision of reality, historians
found in Charles Beard and Vernon L. Parrington a simplistic and
stilted theory of conflict. If economic conflict was the key to history,
how did the United States survive a world depression and a world war
with its institutions and values intact? After the war three prominent
historians, Richard I-Iofstadter, Daniel J. Boorstin, and Louis Hartz,
addressed themselves to this question of American uniqueness and
exceptionalism. Significantly, all three had come of political age during
the thirties; all had been influenced by Marxism, by what Boorstin
called "the materialist interpretation of history." They never completely
abandoned that perspective. For, although they departed from European
Marxism in denying class conflict in America, they also departed from
progressive historiography in denying moral conflict. What resulted
was something of a Marxist description without a Marxist solution.
Minimizing the role of democratic and ethical ideals, they still stressed
the driving forces of economics, environment, and social structure.
Hofstadter discovered "a kind of mute organic consistency" in the
ideologies of all major statesmen from Jefferson to Hoover, a philosophy 145
 81-83 Historians Daniel Boorstin (above
left), Richard Hofstadter (above right),
and Louis Hartz (below), who, though in-
fluenced by Marxist "materialist interpre-
tations," later rejected the idea of class
conflict for a consensus interpretation of
the American past.

of economic individualism that bound Americans to the values of com-

petitive capitalism and made America "a democracy of cupidity rather
than a democracy of fraternity." In a critique similar to Marx's at-
tack on nineteenth-century liberalism, Hofstadter observed that the
American Constitution had dehumanized man by sanctifying property
and by codifying a Hobbesian view of unchanging human nature.
"Modern humanistic thinkers who seek for a means by which society
may transcend eternal conflict and rigid adherence to property" would
find no answer in the philosophy of the Founding Fathers.35
Where Hofstadter located America's political values in the repugnant
"cupidity" of bourgeois liberalism, Boorstin located them in the resplen-
146 dent spaciousness of the American environment. Since Americans be-
lieved that values arose not from mind but from nature, Boorstin found
the American "genius" in the mindless activity of a Paul Bunyan rather
than in the heightened consciousness of a William lames, in the "un-
predicted whisperings of environment" rather than in the theoretical
and moral intellect. Louis Hartz also realized that the American polit-
ical mind had little capacity for moral vision, but while Boorstin
celebrated the discovery, Hartz, like Hofstadter, deplored it. In a bril-
liant analysis of the relationship between social structure and ideology,
Hartz maintained that the absence of a feudal heritage in America led
naturally to the development of middle-class, Lockian liberalism,
which made the acquisition of property tantamount to the "pursuit of
happiness." Because America did not experience a real social revolution
in 1776, America was "born free" (Tocqueville's phrase). Lacking an
ancient régime to resist radical change, America also lacked a mass
socialist movement struggling for radical change. The absence of an
entrenched, anti-industrial Right in America deprived the Left of an
identifiable enemy against which a hostile class consciousness might
have developed. Since there was neither a landed aristocracy to destroy
nor a landless mob to denounce, liberalism absorbed America.36
The historiography of consensus and continuity that emerged in the
1950's is fraught with irony. So placid and homogenized did the image
of the American past become that many historians began to argue
whether there was anything to argue about. Moreover, the description
of Americans as a homely people whose mental horizons had been
bounded by common political attitudes and economic values began
more and more to seem like the false consciousness of "one-dimensional
man" that Herbert Marcuse popularized the following decade. Indeed,
Boorstin and Marcuse could agree, albeit for different reasons, that
Americans lacked a radical ideology and a theoretical vision enabling
them to transcend the "given" values of capitalism. But the final irony
is that Hartz himself anticipated a way out for radicals who could find
no inspiration in a consensualized American past. More than any other
historian, Hartz realized that America's "irrational Lockianisrn" had
become "one of the most powerful absolutisms in the world," and he
knew that America would be incapable of sympathizing with the need
for radical change at home and revolutions abroad. "Can a people 'born 147
 equal' ever understand peoples elsewhere that have to become so? Can
it ever understand itself?" Unlike most literary scholars and historians
of the fifties, Hartz Was one of the few writers who perceived that
America's intellectual heritage could provide no answers to the trou-
bling dilemmas of modern political life. "Instead of recapturing our
..
past, we have got to transcend it . There is no going home again for
America." In contrast to Boorstin, who was convinced that the outside
world had nothing to teach America, Hartz maintained that "America
must look to its contact with other nations to provide that spark of
philosophy, that grain of relative insight that its own history has denied
it." The New Left of the l960's would scarcely be aware of how it had
followed Hartz's advice when it found in the "third world" a flash of
radical insight that the American past had denied it.37

Philosophy: From Marx to lames

American historians could use a truncated Marxist mode of analysis
to explain the "uniqueness" of America, but few intellectuals could
accept the philosophical propositions upon which the entire structure
of Marxist thought depends. The premises of historical materialism
led to a battery of unresolved questions: To what extent do the ideas
of human beings react upon the environment? Do changes in material
circumstances affect real changes in mind? If man is governed by laws
"independent of human will, consciousness, and intelligence," can in-
dividuals influence the course of history? These issues were thrashed
out in learned journals like the Marxist Quarterly and Modern Month-
ly. Among philosophers, Sidney Hook established himself as the logi-
cian of the American Left with the publication of Towards the Under-
standing of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (1933). Here he
tried to Americanize Marxism by demonstrating that the Marxist theory
of knowledge as praxis-that is, proving ideas in social action-could
be found in the "epistemological activism" of lames and Dewey. Hook's
erudite essays on Marxism, pondered by students and young radicals,
were circulated "like the reports of the great theologians' disputes in
the Middle Ages," recalled Lewis Feuer. "Copies of the Symposium and
Modern Monthly articles were passed among impecunious undergrad-
148 uate hands. Soon, however, a warning spread through the left-wing
 84 Sidney Hook, logician of the
Old Left in the 1930's, who be-
came critical of many of its theo-
retical foundations.

grapevine: Hook is a revisionist."38 Communists regarded the scrappy

Hook as subversive because, aside from his political independence, he
dared to question the mystique of dialectical materialism. The dialectic
is the fountainhead of Marxist optimism. That all history is class con-
flict, that capitalism and socialism are absolute polar opposites pre-
cluding all other alternatives, and that revolution will negate all the
existential contradictions in man's social life are convictions deeply
rooted in the dialectic. Basically an illuminating concept of change
involving the contradiction and reconciliation of a triadic thesis, anti-
thesis, and synthesis, the dialectic became a vessel into which any idea
could be poured. To Marxists the triad suggested feudalism, capitalism,
and socialism; but to Christians it could mean the creation, the fall,
and the redemption, and to Freudians, instinct, repression, and subli-
mation. All along, many academic philosophers had doubted the
validity of the dialectic, and in 1940 three important books appeared
that repudiated it as either religious myth, pseudologic, or even a
Pythagorean allusion suggesting the insurgent power of a phallic sym-
bol: Max Eastrnan's Marxism is it Science, Hook's Reason, Social Myths
and Democracy, and Edmund Wilson's T o the Finland Station. Three
years later Hook went even further and challenged the whole Marxist 149
 approach to historical understanding in The Hero in History. Main-
taining that great "event-making" personalities like Lenin had deci-
sively influenced the course of history, Hook returned to William
James' classical protest against absolute determinism.
The crisis in philosophical Marxism resulted in large part from the
inability of Marxists to predict the failure of the proletariat and the
triumph of Hitler and Stalin. Instead of an experimental guide to
action, Marxist philosophy now appeared an ironclad system of laws
that gave intellectuals what James had once derided as the "sumptu-
osity of security." Some philosophers, like Hook and Roy Wood Sellars,
salvaged from Marxism its brilliant epistemological insights and its
materialist analysis of social change. Others abandoned Marxism corn-
pletely for humanism or existentialism. What was curious about the
discussion of Marxism in the late thirties and early forties was the
absence of any mention of "alienation." The "God that failed" the
Old Left was the cold, thundering prophet of scientific laws and his-
torical doom. The Old Left was not aware of the younger Marx of the
"Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts" (1844), where one finds the
first conceptualization of alienation as rooted in the monotony of indus-
trial work. It is in this document that the New Left of the 1960's found
a vital ethical consciousness in Marxism. Henceforth Marx could no
longer be treated simply as the demon of the dialectic. When Marxism
emerged again in American radical thought it was not as a crude science
of prediction but as a penetrating, humanist critique of the sickness of
modern society.

PESSIMISM AND RELEVANCE

THE GULF BETWEEN
Between the Old Left of the 1930's and the New Left of the 1960's would
lie a gulf of hostility. Younger students rejected the Marxist critique
that older radicals tried to pass along. This generational denial was
unfortunate. For the existentialism that some ex-Marxists espoused
after the Second World War was not completely incompatible with
radicalism, as Jean Paul Sartre would demonstrate; Burnham's theory
150 of bureaucratic and technological power could be critically applied to
the elitist structure of American society, as C. Wright Mills would
demonstrate; and the Judeo-Christian sense of tragedy, which Niebuhr
and Heiberg rediscovered, could be elevated to a higher anguish of
social guilt and political responsibility, as Michael Harrington would
demonstrate in his writings and Martin Luther King in his actions.
Ultimately, what discredited the Old Left and caused it to lose moral
authority in the eyes of a younger generation was the cold war. After
Stalinism and the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe, the Old Left
became convinced that democratic freedom and one-party dictator-
ships are incompatible. After the experience of McCarthyism, an anti-
communist hysteria that fed upon cold-war tensions, the waning Left
lived in a constant fear of "witch hunts" and right-wing repression.
Unable to believe in democratic revolution abroad and radical change
at home, veteran Leftists could no longer sustain their vital spirit,
their will to believe that existing reality can be negated and trans-
formed, that ideals can be realized despite the dark record of historical
experience.
A change of temper came over the radical intellectuals as they moved
into the 1950's and out of politics, addressing themselves in Partisan
Review to cultural criticism and the problem of mass society. Even in
the politically conscious Dissent, writers felt deeply the loss of inno-
cence and good hope. The simple faiths of former Trotskyists like Howe
gave way to a feeling for the moral complexities of political action and
the structural complexities of political power. Thus, when the nearly
defunct old Left saw familiar radical mythologies re-emerging in the
l960's, the only counsel it could impart was the counsel of failure.
"C)urs, a 'twice born' generation," wrote Daniel Bell, "finds its wisdom
in pessimism, evil, tragedy, and despair. So we are both old and young
before our time."39 The New Left of the 1960's rejected the tragic mood
of ambiguity and irony that hung over the collective memory of older
radicals. The Old Left could only offer the lessons of experience, which
to a subsequent generation must always seem like wisdom without
power and knowledge without action. The cry that went up in the
1960's for "relevance" became a cry not for truth itself but for a truth
that could be made politically useful. The Old Left could not respond
to this demand. Having tasted power and having seen the future, the 151

\.
 "twice born" generation rejected both. Richard Hofstadter poignantly
summed up the pathos of his generation of the thirties: "The war, the
bomb, the death camps wrote finis to an era of human sensibility, and
many writers of the recent past were iminolated in the ashes, caught
up like the people of Pompeii in the midst of life, some of them in curi-
ous postures of unconsummated rebellion."40

Notes
1 Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. III, The Triumph of
the Soviets, trans. Max Eastman (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1967), p. 174.
Caroline Bird's phrase, quoted in Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of
the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 3.
3 Edmund Wilson, "The Literary Consequences of the Crash," in Shores of Light:
A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, 1952),
PP. 498-99.
4F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack- Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions,
19561, PP- 79-84.
5 Lawson to Dos Passos, n.d., Dos Passos mss, Alderman Library, University of
Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.; Granville Hicks, "Communism and the American
Intellectuals," in Whose Revolution? ed. Irving D. Talrnadge (New York: Howell,
Sosldn, 1941), p. 84.
6 Sidney Hook, Toward an Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpreta-
tion (New York: Iohn Day, 1933); Louis Hacker, "The American Revolution," Marx-
ist Quarterly, I (Jan.-Mar., 1937), 46-67; id., "The American Civil War," Marxist
Quarterly, I (Apr.-June, 1937), 191-213; Lewis Corey, "Veblen and Marxism,"
Marxist Quarterly, I (Jan.-Mar., 1937), 162-68.
Writers . on the Left, p. 158.
7 Aaron,
Howe, "A Memoir of the Thirties," in Steady Work: Essays in the Politics
8 Irving
of Democratic Radicalism, 1953-1966 (New York: Harcourt, 1966), pp. 357-59.
9 Floyd Dell, quoted in Freeman, An American Testament, p. 404; and in Aaron,
pp. 217-18; Gold to Calverton, May 4, 1925, Calverton rnss, New York Public Library.
i0Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,
trans. RodNey Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971), pp. 1-2.4; Arthur
Koestler, Arrow in the Blue (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 272.
11 Freeman, p. 663.
12Dos Passos's remark is in the important symposium, "Whither the American
Writer," Modern Quarterly, VI (Summer, 1932), 11-12.
13Staughton Lynd, ed., "Personal Histories of the Early CIO," Radical America, V
(May~June, 1971), 49-85; Theodore Draper, "Gastonia Revisited," Social Research,
XXXVIII (Spring, 1971), .3-29; id., "Communists and Miners, 1928-1933/' Dissent,
XIX (Spring, 1972), 371-92; see also John L. Shover, "The Communist Party and the
152 Midwest Farm Crisis of 1933/' Journal of American History, LI (Sept 1964)1 248-66.
14 Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: Lou-
isiana State Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 51-103; Iohn P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism:
The View from America (Princeton, N.).: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 306-12.
15 Quoted in Hal Draper, "The Student Movement of the Thirties," in As We Saw the
Thirties, ed. Rita Simon (Urbana~ Univ. of Illinois Press, 1969), p. 156.
forbid., p. 176.
17 Nathan Glazer, The Social Bases of American Communism (New York: Harcourt,
1961).
18Theodore Draper, "The Ghost of Social Fascism," Commentary, XLVII (Feb.,
1969), 2.9-42; Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, pp. 2,13-2.0.
19 Quoted in Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Crit-
ical History (New York: Praeger, 1957), p. 338.
?Upton Sinclair, quoted in Frank A. Warren, Liberals and Communism: The "Red
Decade" Revisited (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), p. 116.
21 Hemingway to Dos Passos, 1938, Dos Passes rnss.
ZZ Lovestone, "The Moscow Trials in Historical Perspective," Workers Age, VI (Feb.
6, 1937), 2>.
22>Wi1son, "American Critics, Left and Right," in Shores of Light, p. 643; Waldo
Frank, Chart for Rough Water (New York: Doubleday, 1940), p. 43; Malcolm Cowley,
"The Sense of Guilt," The Kenyon Review, CV (Spring, $965), 265.
24Max Schactman, "Is Russia a Workers' State?" The New International, VI (Dec,
1940), 195-205.
?-5W. H. Auden, quoted in George Novack, "Radical Intellectuals in the 1930's,"
International Socialist Review, XXIX (Mar.-Apr., 1968), 33; Hicks, "Communism
and the American Intellectuals," pp. 107-08.
P-6 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. I (Chieago- Charles Kerr, 1906), p. 837.
27Lewis Corey, The Crisis of the Middle Class (New York' Covici, Friede, 1935) ;
id., "American Class Relations," The Marxist Quarterly, (Apr.-June, 1937), 134-43;
id., "The Middle Class," Antioch Review, V (Spring, 1945), 68-87; Max Lerner,
America as a Civilization (New York: Simon $L Schuster, 1957), pp. 465-540; Sey-
mour Martin Lipset, Political Man, pp. 163.
28Iohn Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing
Power. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 193; Lipset, P.442; Werner Sombart,
quoted in Bell, End of Ideology, pp. 276-77.
7-9James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (New York: Iohn Day, 1941).
30Lipset, pp. 87-126; Max Weber, quoted in Bell, p. 275.
31 Will Herberg, "From Marxism to Judaism," Commentary, III (Ian., 1947) 25-32;
fd., I'udaiszn and Modern Man (New York: Farrar, 1951), p. 28; Reinhold Niebulir,
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Scribner, 1944),
pp. 86-118.
321-Ierber8, Iudaism and Modern Man, pp. 8-43; Niebuhr, Children of Light, p. xiii;
for the influence of Niebuhr on American liberalism, see the essays by Kenneth
Thompson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and David Williams in Charles W. Kegley and
Robert W. Bretall, Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought
(New York: Macmillan, 1956), pp. 126-75, 194-213.
33"The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions," Partisan Review, VI
(Summer, 1939), 25-51. 153
 ?»4Louis Kronenberger's remark is from the syrnposiurn "Our Country and Our Cul-
ture," an important intellectual document of the 1950's that ran in three issues
of the Partisan Review, XIX (May-June, July-Aug., Sept.-Oct.), 282-326, 420-50,
562-97, Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds, p. 485.
35 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1948),
pp_ viii, 16-17, passim.
36Danie1 I. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (ChiF:ago- Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1953); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt,
1955]; see also Cohn P. Diggins, "Consciousness and Ideology in American History-
The Burden of Daniel J. Boorstin," American Historical Review, LXXVI (Feb., 1971),
99-118.
37 Hartz, Liberal Tradition, pp. 32, 309.
38 Lewis S. Feuer, "From Ideology to Philosophy: Sidney Hook's Writings on Marx-
ism," in Sidney Hook and the Contemporary World: Essays on the Pragmatic Intel-
ligence, ed. Paul Kurtz (New York: John Day, 1968), p. 37.
39 Bell, End of Ideology, p. 300.
40 Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 357.

154
 The New Left

Communism? Who the hell knows from

Communism? We never lived through
Stalin. We read about it, but it doesn't af-
fect us emotionally. Our emotional reaction
to Cornrnunisrn is Fidel marching into
Havana in 1959.
Ierry Rubin

Nothing is clearer to a later generation than

the naivety of an earlier one, just as nothing
is clearer to the earlier one than the naivety
of the later.
Stephen Spender

In 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four black students S. 'pped

up to a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter and quietly asked to be
served. Three years later four black children died in the dynamiting
of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In
1961, Robert Moses, a northern student steeped in Camus, trekked alone
into the deepest and most violent parts of the South to register black
voters. Three years later the bodies of slain civil-rights workers James
Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were found in an
earthen darn in Mississippi. Those were some of the unifying events
for a new generation whose demand for public morality was answered
with murder. 155
 s

ml y

85 Antisegregationists picket a Woo1worth's store in Raleigh, North Carolina,

in 1960.

The radicalism of the l960's was born in deed, not in doctrine. The
action began in the South, America's moral looking-glass and embar-
rassing mirror image. The antisegregation protests soon spread to
northern cities, where young whites and blacks engaged in peaceful
sit-in demonstrations against job discrimination. The 1964 Berkeley
Free Speech movement was a galvanizing experience after which the
college campus would become the scene of bitter confrontations and
escalating radical demands. As the 1960's unfolded, the New Left moved
backwards into the l930's. Starting with nonideological reformist goals,
it would end by issuing heavily doctrinaire ultimatums. The Old Left
began with a whoop of revolution and sank into a whimper of recon-
ciliation-thanks to Russia; the New Left started in a spirit of modera-
tion and ended calling for nothing less than revolution-thanks to
!\nierica.
The New Left was one of the great political surprises of the mid-
twentieth century. It arose suddenly, in the wake of the quiescent con-
formism of the politically silent generation of the fifties. Something
of a historical mutation, its appearance defied the expectations of soci-
156 ologists, who depicted American youths as "other-directed" personal-
ities and the corporation men of the future. It defied opinion surveyors,
who found students conservative and politically apathetic. And it
defied the Old Left, which had declared America the graveyard of radi-
calism. In order to begin to understand the phenomenon of the New
Left, or perhaps not to misunderstand it, it is necessary to discuss
briefly three interrelated developments that provided its historical
setting: the economic context of affluence and guilt, the political con-
text of disillusionment and powerlessness, and the cultural context of
alienation and anxiety.

FROM ALIENATION TO ACTIVISM

Young radicals of the sixties were mainly the children of parents who
had grown up in the thirties and forties. Rushed into adulthood after
having survived the privations of depression and war, their parents
embarked upon a frenzy of spending and building. Systematically
they bulldozed the American landscape, replacing it with shopping
centers and ticky-tacky housing developments until the monotony of
the environment began to resemble the drab uniformity of a Second
World War army camp. While showering the children with the good
things in life that had been denied them, the parents were too busy
getting ahead to conceive life in any deeper terms than those of eco-
nomic security and material comfort. Frozen at the level of material
existence, American society became an antiseptic wasteland of stucco
and plastic; echoing Henry Miller, the Beat poets of the fifties called
it "an air-conditioned nightmare."
laded by affluence, estranged from parents who so valued this af-
fluence, young radicals began to sense that their middle-class alienation
had something in common with lower-class exploitation. The key social
document for the early sixties was Michael Harrington's The Other
America (1963). Here high-school seniors and college freshmen first
read about the desperate "invisible poor," who had been hidden from
America by a mental wall of suburban content. The discovery of the
existence of poverty and racism in the ghettos of the North as well as
the South brought forth what Jack Newfield described as "a kind of
mass vomit against the hypocrisy of segregation." At first middle-class 157
 86 Typical uniformity
and regimentation in a
huge suburban housing
subdivision in San Le-
andro, California.

youths, nurtured by their parents' part-time liberalism, found some

hope for change in the Kennedy administration. But as the New Frontier
turned out to be more style than substance, young activists thirsted all
the more for a new politics of personal witness and moral con frontation.
According to Tom Hayden, those who worked on voter registration in
the South experienced "schizoid or ambivalent feelings" toward the
White House, which "might" support their efforts only "when push
came to shove." When President Kennedy was assassinated, on Novem-
ber 22, 1968, ambivalence turned to anguish as young people felt more
politically alone than ever. "For me this one act," a student told his
158 professor, "has made all other acts irrelevant and trivial; it has dis-
placed time with paranoia, good with evil, relative simplicity with
incomprehensibility, and an ideal with dirt."1
The same sense of personal loss and political distrust grew also out
of the diplomatic developments of the sixties. The young, who had in-
herited the atomic bomb as a child inherits an incurable disease, orig-
inally looked to Kennedy as an idealist without illusions. The new
President refrained from attacking neutralism, established the Peace
Corps as a means of helping underdeveloped countries, and allowed
his ambassador to the United Nations, the urbane Adlai Stevenson,
to speak of the need to "make the world safe for diversity." But any
hope that there would be a re-examination of America's cold~war pol-
icies was soon shattered by the Bay of Pigs invasion (April, 1961), which
indicated to many that the President had rejected the old strategy of
the threat of massive nuclear retaliation only to adopt the covert strat-
egy of counter-insurgency. Young radicals, now beginning to identify
with the political and economic destiny of the "third world," embraced
Fidel Castro as the embodiment of a "new humanist socialism" while
attacking the faceless, bureaucratic "socialism" of eastern Europe.2
With Kennedy's death, American militarism, always latent in his
administration, grew malignant. Thereafter America's increasing in-
volvement in the Vietnam war dramatized to young anti-war dissenters

l-q,

87 Activist Tom Hayden, once leader

of the SDS, at the time of his trial (with
seven others) for conspiracy to riot at
the 1968 Democratic National Conven-
tion in Chicago.

so
 the powerlessness of idealism. Hopes for an end of the interminable war
were aroused in the 1968 democratic primaries, when Senators Eugene
McCarthy and Robert Kennedy challenged President Lyndon Johnson's
renomination. But McCarthy's following was confined to young white
liberals; and an assassin's bullet tragically cut short the promising
career of the young Kennedy, the only major candidate who appealed
to the blacks and Chicanos as well as some white radicals-perhaps
the only one who might have been able to put together a "rainbow
coalition." As Kennedy's body lay in state in St. Patrick's Cathedral,
activist Torn Hayden was seen sitting in the rear, crying quietly and
holding in his hand a guerrilla beret given to him by Fidel Castro.
The culture of the young, especially their rock and folk music, re-
flected their growing mood of frustration and powerlessness. Contra-
puntal notes of joy and sadness, love and loneliness, fantasy and dread
reverberated in the lyrics of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson
Airplane, and Bob Dylan. The optimistic call for revolt was often ac-
companied by a fatalistic sense of political impotence and an acute
conviction that filial love was a snare and the "American Dream" a
fraud. Hence the Jefferson Airplane:
War's a good business, so give your son . . .
And I'd rather have my country die for me .
Sell your mother for a Hershey bar
Grow up looking like a canJ.A

The demon of technology also emerged as a rock theme. The young

felt that a technolological culture denied man's autonomy and the
reality of values like beauty and love, mystery and imagination. And
behind the cult of the machine lurked the imminence of holocaust,
as the poet Dylan prophesies'
This wheel's on fire
Rolling down the road
lust notify my next of kin
This wheel shall explode.T
*From REJOYCE by Grace Slick. © 1968 by Iceberg Corp. A11 rights reserved. Re-
printed by permission.
'l'From THIS WHEEL'S ON FIRE, words by Bob Dylan. © 1967 Dwarf Music. Reprint-
160 ed by permission.
 The cultural alienation of the young also signified an increasing
rejection of the values of the industrial way of life: work, duty, ration-
ality, and mastery of the environment. More and more middle-class
youths began to turn against these Protestant values in order to recap-
ture nature and feeling. The romantic pastoralism was most pro-
nounced in the hippie phenomenon. The children of this new ethereal
culture appeared to have moved beyond not only capitalism but mate-
rialism itself. Their communal life style suggested a sustained willing-
ness to share all one's possessions so that the body might be dispossessed
and the "soul" freed. In search of new, notational sources of wisdom,
hippies turned to intuition, telepathy, and the occult; and in their
quest for moral purification and self-expression they displayed a re-
markable indifference to organizational failure. Their only fear was
the institutionalized boredom of their parents-what the earlier Puri-
tans used to call deadness of heart. Some hippies took up Zen, Lao-tzu,
and tantric Yoga, desiring, in the spirit of Thoreau, to transcend phys-
ical reality; others became disciples of Wilhelm Reich and Norman O.
Brown, desiring, in the spirit of Whitman, to immerse themselves in
the pleasures of the body and embrace the holiness of sin. Toward the
end of the 1960's America witnessed a series of Dionysiae folk-rock
festivals-huge, organized "happenings" celebrating passion, experi-
ence, and fulfillment, instead of the old western culture of reason,
knowledge, and achievement. "Every period which abounded in folk
songs has, by the same token, been deeply stirred by Dionysiac cur-
rents," wrote Nietzsche a century ago.3
The emergence of what Theodore Roszak called a "counter culture"
accounted for the unusual degree of personalism and humanism in the
early New Left. Young radicals shared the hippies' desire to restore
warmth to human relationships, to translate social problems into
dialogues of conscience that would lead to moral action. Originally
a psychoethical rather than a doctrinal movement, the New Left also
felt the need to achieve "authenticity." Yet, before long, the hippies'
antipolitics of solipsism and ecstasy became unacceptable to many New
Left activists. For one thing, the old epistemological problem divided
the hippies from the activists in much the same way it had divided the
nineteenth-century transcendentalists from the abolitioIlists: If feeling 161
88 Part of the throng at the huge folk-rock festival in Woodstock, New York, in 1970, an in-
stance of changes in life style wrought by the "counterculture." Many participants believed
themselves to be making a "new nation."

determines reality, as the hippies maintained, then the poor and

oppressed were merely those who felt poor and oppressed. Salvation
lay not in changing conditions but in changing perceptions-and the
door to perception was not politics but psychedelia ("Imagination is
Revolution!"). Moreover, when the hippies spoke of peace and love
they were talking about an ethic of passivity, a creative quietism that
seemed dangerously innocent to experienced activists. I-Iippics may not
have been going through the "technological obsolescence of masculin-
ity," as Leslie Fiedler charged when he described the tight pants and
long hair of males who saw themselves as "more seduced than seduc-
ing," but no doubt there was a tenderness to their life style that trans-
formed the traditionally aggressive male into a political cipher. Power
grows out of the barrel of a gun, the New Left was convinced, not from
the bud of a flower.4
Antecedent Lefts: Differences and Similarities
Despite these differences, the New Left and the hippies were alienated
162 allies. The same could not be said for the New Left and the Old Left.
89 Members of a New Mexico commune in meditation, one expression of the all_
nation of the young not politicized by the New Left.
 The New Left's main charge against the old radicals was the "trahison
des clercs, " the intellectual cop-out of ex-Troyskyists like Irving Howe
and Dwight Macdonald, who supposedly compromised their Leftism by
their anticommunism, and of leaders like Michael Harrington and
Bayard Rustin, older labor movement radicals who chose to work
through the system. Advocating coalition politics and reformist pro-
grams, the Old Left seemed to young radicals to have committed the sins
of their fathers by becoming "establishment liberals."5
But the real difference between the two generations of radicals is
more a matter of context than tactics. The historic context of the Old
Left was the abundance of poverty, that of the New Left the poverty of
abundance. The Depression led older radicals to believe that history
would do for them what they could not do for themselves. Assuming
that the masses would be radicalized as America went from bad to
worse, they could find reassurance in the Trotskyist adage, "the worse
the better." The children of affluence, however, confronted the other
side of the proposition, and thus for them a change of consciousness had
to precede, or at least accompany, a change of conditions. Their hope
was that a socialist consciousness would develop as the victims of soci-
ety liberated themselves through autonomous community action. The
Old Left, educated on the realistic determinism of Marx and Lenin,
remained skeptical of the noble dream that participatory democracy
would engage the needs and interests of impoverished minority groups .
The New Left, brought up on the psychological optimism of neo-Freud-
ians like Eric Fromm and the communitarian ideals of progressive
educationists, enjoyed endless visions of human possibility.
"As for old socialists," wrote the young novelist Jeremy Larger,
"their limitations as people seem disastrous, and frustrate me insofar
as they are my own. They appear to be tedious, tired of themselves,
full of self-hate, and chained to an idealism so abstract that it precludes
all love of life." The New Left claimed to be chained neither to doctrine
nor to history. "The old Marxist Left was intensely ideological," stated
the young organizer Clark Kissinger. "They could rattle off the cause
of any war as capitalism, imperialism, fight for free markets- one two
three. We are characterized primarily by skepticism. Not having all
164 the answers, we don't pretend to." The New Left relied "more on feel
than theory," explained Hayden. From the perspective of this new anti-
nomianism, the unpardonable sin of the Old Left was less the inade-
quacy of its formal ideology than its loss of passion. "When they pro-
claim the end of ideology," stated Kissinger, "it's like an old man
proclaiming the end of sex. Because he doesn't feel it anymore, he thinks
it has disappeared." Yet if the young radicals could not tolerate the
veteran's dried-up dogmatism, neither could the latter comprehend
the youth's renascent mysticism, which seemed more symptomatic of
a religious revival than a social revolution. "We went in for Talmudic
exegesis," stated Fiedler to an audience of students, "you go in for holy
rolling."6 ,

In spirit, the New Left was originally closer to the 1913 rebels than
to the Marxists of the thirties. For one thing, both generations saw
themselves as self-conscious youth movements. Bourne's description
of youth as the "rich rush and flood of energy" and his attacks on the
"1:nedievalism" of college education had their echo in the New Left's
quest for original innocence and in its attacks on the "multiversity."
Reed's and Dell's reflections on "Life at Thirty" indicated that the New
Left was not the first generation to become obsessed with that age as the
point at which self-trust turns to doubt. And Walter Weyl, in his post-
mortem on the "tired radicals" of the First World War, perceived that
the Left's greatest enemy was age itself, a biological fact that has
haunted both generations: "Adolescence is the true day of revolt, the
day when obscure forces, as mysterious as growth, push us, trembling
out of our narrow lives into the wide throbbing life beyond self."7
In its clan and anarchist bravado the New Left also resembled the
Lyrical rebels. The parallel was particularly apparent with respect to
the yippies, whose calculated strategy of sensation and shock seemed
less designed to take power than to liquidate it by laughter. The impish
antics of Reed and Dell, whose outlandish behavior offended party
socialists, were carried on by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who
believed that "confusion is mightier than the sword," that ideology
was the "brain disease" of the Left, and that a "Be In" was a prelude
to revolution. Women's rights, which was in the forefront of the New
Left, had also been a passionate concern of the Lyrical rebels. Max and
Crystal Eastman cllanlpioned female suffrage and the emancipation of 165
 ai.i

W/14f-"e "'~
iv-~ Lse WOULD you WEAR ON Youl22~<* BIRTHDAY!

90 Nudism in the theater-the cast of Hair- another reflection of "counterculture" influ-

ence.

the housewife from the drudgery of domesticity; and Emma Goldman's

demand for complete sexual parity made her one of the founding sisters
of the women's liberation movement. As for the sexual revolution itself,
doubtless the New Left went much further. Dell and Eastman would
have been bewildered by those youths of the 1960's who saw Freud as
an oppressor of women ("Freud is a fink"), an aphrodisiac as the answer
to alienation, and the orgasm of the body as the proper oblivion of the
mind. The Lyrical Left had to struggle seriously against government
censorship and the moral repression of society. The dilemma of the
New Left was that government and society had become so permissive
about sex that it found itself in a vacuum of nonresistance. Eventually,
the underground culture had to escalate the flaunting of eroticism,
from sex to nudity and ultimately to pornography, hoping to meet
opposition so that it could expose American society as sick and re-
pressed. But as the popular success of the musical Hair indicated, the
American middle class was not outraged but titillated by private pleas-
ures made public. Although the counterculture continued to believe
that nakedness would liberate the mind from its "ego-defenses," the
New Left wanted to make the revolution with its working clothes 0n.8
Cultural differences aside, the New Left almost echoed the Old Left
166 in political rhetoric. Comparing the New Masses and Modern Monthly
of the 1930's with Ramparts and Liberation of the 1960's, one finds the
same view of America as a "corporate state" bent on imperialistic war,
the same equation of liberalism and fascism, and the same attack on
the liberal Center in order to "shorten the birth pangs of history." Nor
did the New Left disabuse itself of the older Stalinist cult of personality.
The adulation of Chairman Mao allowed young radicals to dismiss the
terrorism of the Red Guard with the same naiveté as older radicals had
shown in dismissing the Moscow trials. The will to mythologize also
remained characteristic. Despite Castro's courageous admission that
Cuba had failed to advance workers' self-management through non-
material incentives, the New Left still looked to Cuba's campesinos as
models of participatory democracy, just as the Old Left once looked to
Russia's collectives as models of grassroots democracy. Finally, although
the New Left started out as an open, democratic, and nonideological
movement, it became the opposite; by the end of the 1960's much of the

91 Mao Tse-tung,
Chinese revolutionary
leader and a focus of
adulation by the PLP.
 92 Cuba's Fidel Castro, leader of its revolution, esteemed by many of the New Left.

New Left had reverted to the stale clichés of economic Marxism, suc-
cumbed to the curse of sectarianism, and, like the Old Left, found itself
in desperate isolation.

FROM PORT HURON TO PEKING

The Civil-Rights Movement
The Old Left died when communist Russia failed to fulfill its proph-
ecies; the New Left was born when democratic America failed to keep
its promises. The first stirrings of the postwar Left originated in the
civil-rights movement. Led by respectable, middle-class black students,
the southern antisegregation campaign was basically a moral protest
entirely within the spirit of the law. For a century the South had been
able to circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which
guaranteed voting rights and equal protection of the law to black
Americans; and for almost a decade the South managed to sabotage the
168 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered the immediate desegregation
of public schools. Thus, when the protests began in the South there
was no call for social revolution. The tactics of civil disobedience and
passive resistance reflected the Christian principles of love and justice,
values that had lived on in a land where the black Baptist Church had
instilled an ethic of stoic suffering. Visiting Amite, Mississippi, lack
Newfield observed that "a meeting in a broken-down shack called a
church approaches Gandhian agape with the singing of religious
hymns and the preachments of love thy neighbor." White students
who risked their lives as Freedom Riders in 1961, and those who par-
ticipated in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, discovered in the
deep South "simple people living lives of relative peace, love, honor,
courage, and humor." Their crusade became a "back-to-the-people"
movement in which youths could struggle in interracial solidarity
to overcome their isolated existence. "We seek a community," said
one activist, "in which man can realize the full meaning of the self
which demands open relationships with others."9

Students for a Democratic Society

The same quest for intimate community and selfhood inspired stu-
dents in the North who were outraged by the Cossack-like police charge
against the Birmingham civil-rights demonstrators in late spring 1963.
The northern movement first organized around the Students for a
Democratic Society, which grew from a few dozen activists in 1962
to about 8000 core members at its height in 1968, when it also had
50,000 to 75,000 students casually affiliated through hundreds of cam-
pus chapters. More than any other organization, SDS shaped the tone
and spirit of the early New Left. Generally from secure, upper-middle-
class white families, SDS members included gifted graduate students
and sophomore dropouts, Christian pacifists and militant confronta-
tionists, weekend potheads and midnight mystics. Its "Port Huron
Statement," drawn up in 1962, was the first manifesto in the history
of the American Left to focus primarily on the problem of ethical exis-
tence. Here values like "fraternity," "honesty/' and "love" were invoked
to overcome the "estrangement" of modern man. Declaring that "our
work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the
experiment with living," SDS attacked the deterrence theory of the cold 169
 _<;».of -. we1 i*»

93 The 1963 Civil Rights Demonstration i Washington, D.C. The size was estimated at
over 200,000 people.
war, the welfare state, the military-industrial complex, and the public's
"crust of apathy." In 1963 SDS issued a second manifesto, "America
and the New Era," criticizing the Kennedy administration as a "corpo-
rate liberal" political elite. SDS, it must be noted, also applied the same
criticisms to the undemocratic structure of world communist parties,
and it rejected what C. Wright Mills aptly called the "labor meta-
physic"-the illusion that the working class would fulfill its Marxist-
conferred mission of transforming capitalism into socialism. Instead
of a workers' revolt, SDS called for a "democracy of individual partici-
pation" in which all people would share in the social decisions deter-
mining the quality of their lives. With the ethic of "participation"
elevated to a political mystique, and with a small grant of $5,000 from
the United Auto Workers, SDS set up the Economic Research and Action
Project to organize the ghetto poor and develop neighborhood programs .

Progressive Labor Party

Compared to the vague, existential humanism of SDS, the doctrines
of the Progressive Labor Party were depressingly familiar. PL was
formed in 1962, when it broke with the CP and sided with the Red
94 Young marchers in the 1971 "Moratorium Day" rally against the war in Viet-
nam carry portraits of New and Old Left heroes.
 Chinese during the Sino-Soviet rift. Maoist in inspiration, Leninist
in organization, PL opposed the emotional anarchy and spontaneity
of SDS. It subscribed to violence, believed armed struggle probable,
cited Marxist-Leninist doctrine as gospel, and dredged up old terms
like "exploitation" as the last word in social analysis. Intellectually
PL was a throwback to the worst aspects of the Old Left. Offended by
hippie sensuality, uptight about drugs, critical of counter-cultural
heroes like Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, PL seemed a parody of the
grim radicalism that characterized the worst aspects of the Old Left.

Offshoots of the Old

Two other important organizations of the early New Left were the
Young Socialist Alliance and the DuBois Clubs of America. The former
represented the Trotskyist youth branch of the old Socialist Workers
Party. The Trotskyists, keeping the faith of their namesake, continued
to insist that only the working class could carry on the struggle against
Soviet bureaucracy as well as American capitalism. Although number-
ing only a few hundred members at its birth, YSA picked up support
in the late sixties. The DuBois Clubs defied all generalizations about
generational revolt, for they were started by the children of former
communists. Organized in 1964, the DuBois Clubs had roughly 1000
members concentrated in Berkeley, San Francisco, and New York. Like
the post-Stalinist and conservative CP, the young communists advo-
cated worldng with labor unions and supporting, when necessary, the
liberal wing of the Democratic Party. In contrast to SDS, DuBois mem-
bers believed in the enduring viability of Marxist theory; but in contrast
to the Maoist fanaticism of PL, they feared the threat of a new McCar-
thyism and the possibility of native fascism more than they hated
American liberalism.
Originally, SDS believed in the miracle of community organization,
PL in the might of violent revolutionary struggle, YSA in the mystique
of proletarian consciousness, and the DuBois Clubs in the method of
coalition politics. Not surprisingly, SDS regarded PL as dangerously
adventuristic, while the latter accused the former of "bourgeois roman-
ticis1n": YSA criticized DuBois members for betraying the working
172 class, and they in turn suspected young Trotskyists of ideological para-
nota. Beyond the familiar polemics, the history of the Left in the sixties
is the story of the demise of SDS and the rising influence of PL.
Two developments accounted for this shift from participatory social-
ism to revolutionary Maoism. First of all, the Vietnam war undermined
SDS's argument that it was possible to work within the system. SDS was
slow to realize the mounting hostility to the war. Concentrating on
slum neighborhood projects, SDSers felt that the war was not directly
related to the lives of the poor. SDS took an active part in draft resistance
and campus confrontations with military recruiters and Dow Chemical
Company (manufacturers of napalm), and it helped organize the 1965
March on Washington against the Vietnam war. But it was PL, invok-
ing Lenin's First World War thesis on mobilizing the masses against
capitalism and turning a national war into a class war, that could
claim to have the "correct analysis" of the crisis. As more and more
radicals came to regard Vietnam as a war of imperialistic aggression,
PL's classical Marxism appeared to offer a solution.

Black Militants
Moreover, the growing militancy in the black civil-rights movement
meant the Left could no longer be the exclusive province of middle-
class whites. In 1964 Stokely Carmichael emerged in a fury of eloquent
black rage, determined to liberate his people from internal "colonial-
ism." That summer the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party chal-
lenged the Democratic convention for representation on the all-white
Mississippi delegation. After long, bitter negotiations, MFDP was
granted two token seats, and militants came away convinced more than
ever that "black power" was more important than civil rights. At first
the black-power movement, possibly emboldened by the riots in Watts
in 1965 and in Newark in 1967, repudiated its white supporters. During
the 1967 Chicago convention of the National Conference for a New
Politics-organized to promote the black leader Dr. Martin Luther
King and the white antiwar spokesman Dr. Benjamin Spock on a pres-
idential ticket-African-robed black radicals dictated inordinate de-
mands on voting rights, seating arrangements, and resolutions, hu-
miliating white participants, who groaned of "flagellating our white
conscience" and of being "castrated." The following year, after the 173
95 Eldridge Cleaver (in short-sleeved dashiki) and Bobby Scale, Black Panther leaders at a
news conference in 1969. Next to Seale is H. Rap Brown, the revolutionary agitator who went
underground after the Newark riots.

tragic assassination of Dr. King, the Black Panthers emerged as the

leading force of Afro-American militancy. 10
The Black Panther Party had been formed in Oakland, California,
in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Originally the Panthers
seemed just another small band of black nationalists, although better
known than most because of their armed neighborhood patrols. Then
Panther chapters sprung up in the ghettos of a dozen large cities, and
their membership rose to about 5000 in 1968. At the same time the
Panthers broadened their ideology. Inspired by third-world Illuminati
like Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Tse-tung, the
Panthers adopted a "Marxist-Leninist" amalgam that succeeded in
combining nationalism with socialism, preaching self-determination
along with class struggle. Unlike other black nationalist groups, the
Panthers became convinced that a social revolution against racism
and capitalism could be made only by a coalition of whites and blacks.
Accordingly, they entered an alliance with the white-based Peace and
Freedom Party, which ran the black writer Eldridge Cleaver for presi-
dent in the 1968 election. Some white radical groups welcomed this
174 ideological turn, but SDS could not accept the Panthers' claim that
5% LE
our-Anas..
I

RETALIATION TO CRIME: REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE

REPONSE AU CRIME: LA VIOLENCE RQVOLUTIONNAIRF
RESPUESTA AL ASESINATO: VIOLENCIA REVOLUCIONARIA
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96 A Cuban poster celebrates "Black Power" in mutual admiration. From The

Art of Revolution: C'astro'.s Cuba. 1959-70 by Susan Sontag and Dugald Sterrner.
Copyright 1971. Used with permission of McGraw-Hill Book Company.
 they alone constituted the vanguard of the revolution. In July 1969,
at a National Conference for a United Front Against Fascism in Oak-
land, Seale warned "those little bourgeois, snooty nose . . . SDS's"
that if anyone "gets out of Order" they can expect "disciplinary actions
from the Black Panther Party."11
By 1970 the New Left was in disarray. Pressured on one side by Pan-
ther machismo and embarrassed on the other by yippie breakout, it
could no longer sustain an impelling vision or offer a viable program
of action. Without a unified, broad-based organization, without a
leader who could inspire more than a small band of faithful adherents,
the New Left remained what it always had been-a mood in search of
a movement.

DECLINE WITH INFLUENCE

The decline of the New Left may be attributed to at least four factors,
two of which, in particular, had been common to the experience of
preceding Lefts in America.

The Agency of Change

The central dilemma that has faced all three Lefts in twentieth-
century America was the inability to find a social force that would
adopt a commitment of active opposition to the existing order. SDS
originally hoped that at least some sections of the labor movement
could be radicalized. But the American worker proved indifferent to
the New Left and hostile to its libertarian life style. Spurned by trade
unionists, young radicals later flirted with the idea of a "new working
class" emerging among the frustrated, increasingly displaced techno-
logical intelligentsia. But under pressure from dogmatic Marxists who
scorned this new outlook as "petit bourgeois revisionism," SDS dropped
the notion of a white-collar working class. What remained for the non-
communist Left were those groups that originally aroused the sympathy
of young activists, the poor and the oppressed minorities, supposedly
the last remnant of uncoopted virtue in America. Out of a population
of 205 million, there were about 25 million "poor" in the United States.
176 According to the 1970 census, this category included about 34 percent
of the black people and about 10 percent of the white, roughly 7.5 mil-
lion blacks out of a population of 23 million, and 16 million whites
out of 168 million. The remaining poor were Puerto Ricans and Mexi-
can-Americans-1.5 million and 500,000, respectively-and Indians
and others. In the radical sense of the term, the poor scarcely constituted
a solidified "social class" of the racially oppressed, since one-third of
the nonwhite families in America had an income of more than $8,000
per year. Even more serious, since the poor of all colors represented a
small minority (about 13 percent of the total population), it was no
longer possible, as it was in the nineteenth century of Debs and Marx,
to claim that the oppressed had on their side the power of numbers.12
In the beginning, the New Left was not blind to these realities. The
original strategies of participatory democracy, community action, and
self-determination implied that radical change had to be generated
from among small minorities. Nevertheless, the strategy was unreal-
istic from the start. Establishing health clinics, garbage collection,
and nursery schools were noble efforts that helped mitigate the suffering
of the poor but did little to affect real social change. Community control
could offer only control over poverty itself. Participatory democracy
was the naive ideal of a generation that had been reared to believe that
good will and "togetherness" could bring instant change. Innocent of
the realities of power and the slow pace of historical change, lacking
personal experience with the psychology of poverty, young radicals
were unable to cope with setbacks and defeats.

The Vietnam War

The New Left shifted from domestic to international issues in Feb-
ruary 1965, when the Johnson administration began systematic bomb-
ing of North Vietnam. Opposition to the war was first expressed in peti-
tions, peaceful marches, and campus forums. By spring 1967, the anti-
war movement assumed a new militant posture. Demonstrations now
became massive, with participation by as many as 400,000 people (the
April 1967 "mobilization" in New York and San Francisco); organized
draft resistance penetrated several military camps, where servicemen
risked being tried for mutiny by publicly protesting the war; and dozens
of campuses exploded in a spasm of violent protests over issues like 177
 r

VIE

97 Part of a 1971 anti-Vietnam war demonstration in San Francisco, one of several

held nationwide on the same day.
98 Demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio at which four students were shot to death
by National Guardsmen.

ROTC and on-campus military recruiting and classified war research.

Yet the New Left could never successfully organize the discontent that
the war had spawned. Even more serious, after accurately predicting the
inevitable expansion of the war, the New Left found itself powerless
to prevent what it had predicted. The moment of truth came in May
1970, when President Nixon announced his decision to invade Cambo-
dia. America reeled in a torrent of student protest as white puffs of tear
gas rose across the sky of campuses throughout the country. Students
succeeded in closing down or impairing the operations of about 425
colleges, but at a tragic price. In New York City "hard hat" construction
workers waded into a crowd of student demonstrators while police
looked the other way; at Kent State in Ohio, four students were fatally
shot by national guardsmen. Some revolutionists tried to escalate the
confrontation on the campuses, but by the time the smoke had cleared, 179
 a widespread revulsion against violence had developed. Many students
who had been quickly radicalized by the events decided to go off cam-
pus in an attempt to "communicate" with middle America, to explain
their opposition to the war, to organize support for peace candidates,
and to take "the long walk through existing institutions." The follow-
ing year, when the 1971 May Day mobilization was held, the antiwar
movement belonged more to students and the public in general than
to the New Left. "Peace has become respectable," shouted Jerry Rubin
in disgust.13

Repression
Confrontation politics worked well on the campus, where the New
Left could force professors who identified with their antiwar goals
to capitulate to ever-increasing demands and could effectively exploit
the television medium to create the impression that it spoke for the
majority of students. Outside the sanctuary of the campus, however,
confrontation brought a backlash of repression. The nasty awakening
99 A Chicago policeman sprays demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention
with Mace, a disabling riot-control compound.
 100 A demonstrator and a
National Guardsman in a
staring match at the 1968
Chicago demonstration. As
the photograph suggests, the
"gap" was not only between
generations.

came during the Democratic convention of Lune 1968, when the Left
announced its intention to disrupt the proceedings, only to discover
the brute power of Mayor Richard Daley's police force. Every opinion
poll indicated that the substantial majority of the public supported
Daley's inept, merciless treatment of the screaming demonstrators.
Presidential candidate Richard Nixon, playing to the fears of middle
America, made "law and order" the catchword of his campaign. With
the crackdown on campus disorders, the increase in school expulsions,
and the stepped-up war on drugs, the era of tolerance had ended.
No longer could the Left organize demonstrations without fear of
indictment, mount the barricades without fear of the National Guard, 181
 101 The National Guard disperses demonstrators with tear gas at the Berkeley, California
"shut-it-down" strike.

abuse the symbols of America without fear of the hard hats. There was
no doubt now that the government would have the full support of the
majority of the citizenry should it resort to even the severest measures
to suppress the Left. Significantly, the Black Panthers, the most ha-
rassed of all radical groups, were among the first to realize that the
game of confrontation politics was over. In May 1970, when a rally was
held in New Haven in support of the imprisoned Bobby Seale, the Pan-
thers tried to tone down the demonstration for fear of government
reprisal. After the Cambodia crisis, American campuses lapsed into a
strange mood of quiet frustration and fatigue-what Yale President
King ran Brewster called an "eerie tranquility."

Factionalism and Suicidal Extremism

Like all Lefts, the New Left acted out the dismal pattern of faction
and fission. Even the tightly organized Panthers divided into rival sects
182 that accused each other of being police informers or male chauvinists.
But the dissolution of SDS had repercussions for the entire Left. In the
early 1960's PL had set up the May Znd Movement in an attempt to com-
pete with the more popular and more youthful SDS. But in 1965 PL
dissolved this branch and entered SDS. Once inside, PL charged SDS
with student elitism and middle-class condescension toward American
workers. As a result, SDS split wide open at its 1969 convention, with
a majority going over to the Maoist PL. At the same time radicals began
to look beyond the campus and the ghetto in order to end the isolation
of the academic intelligentsia from the mass of workers. The attempt
to forge a "worker-student alliance" (WSA) was prompted in part by
the dramatic May 1968 uprising of what radicals saw as a coalition of
French industrial workers and Parisian students. The newly formed
~WSA accepted PL's thesis that only the working class possessed the
leverage crucial to achieving radical change in America. But the stu-
dents' attempt to infiltrate the factories and support workers' causes
met with little success. In November 1970, 750 members of the now
decimated SDS turned out in Detroit to demonstrate before the General
Motors Building and join the automotive strikers. According to report-
ers, not a factory worker was in sight.14
Meanwhile another faction had been developing within SDS-the
Revolutionary Youth Movement. Skeptical of the potential of students
and workers alike, RYM maintained that it was a mistake to try to
make a revolution in one country when in reality it had already begun
in Vietnam, Cuba, and the rest of the third world. The role of the
Left was thus to align itself with the international revolution abroad
by engaging in irregular warfare behind enemy lines, thereby under-
mining the overextended power of America's imperialistic war rna-
chine. Out of this new strategy came the Weathermen, an underground
guerilla cadre who believed that the core of the "Red Army" could be
built in the streets of America through the symbolic power of violence.
This American version of the nineteenth-century Russian Narodniki
(terrorists) staged its first encounter in Chicago in October 1969.
Dressed in helmets and blue denims, trained in karate, the Weather-
men went on a three-day "trashing" rampage until the police arrested
290 of its 300 members. While radical critics accused the Weathermen
of suicidal "Custerisrn/' several fugitives escaped to New York and 185
 planned to intensify their campaign through the use of well-placed
bombs. In March 1970, three members accidentally killed themselves
while preparing explosives in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
The mangled bodies found in a basement in Greenwich Village-
spiritual home of the first Lyrical rebels-dramatized the tragic despera-
tion and exhaustion of the New Left. During the early civil-rights move-
ment radical youths tried to work through the liberal state. In the
mid-sixties some experimented with counter-institutions. Toward
the close of the decade PL steered a course to orthodox Marxism and
presumably to the unawakened power of the worldng class. The un-
relieved failure of all these strategies culminated in terrorism, the
ego-politics of karma, or, perhaps more charitably, the last act of a
lost cause. 15
Ironically, despite its tactical and strategical failures, the New Left
had achieved one success that had eluded all other Lefts: politically
and morally it made a difference. The 1913 radicals were powerless to
oppose the First World War, the antibolshevik hysteria of 1919, and
102 Solidarity among the Weathermen, whose terrorist extremism seemed the last desperate
gesture of the New Left. Diana Oughton and the others died when their "bomb factory" blew
up.

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the politics of "norlnalcy" in the l920's; and the Old Left was prostrate
in the face of McCarthyism and the cold-war consensus politics of the
l950's. Although the New Left did not stop the war in Vietnam, it did
much to foster sentiment against escalation and to publicize the coin-
plicity of industry and the academic community. Indeed, the publica-
tion of the Pentagon papers vindicated the New Left's skepticism about
the official version of the war. The downfall of Lyndon Johnson, and
President Nixon's pledge to withdraw all American troops from Viet-
nam by the end of 1972, also indicated that the antiwar forces could no
longer be ignored. Even though those forces moved from the streets into
the halls of Congress, it was the New Left that first set them in motion.
There can be no doubt that the New Left, through sustained dissent
and resistance, did much to pressure a government into changing its
course from escalation to withdrawal in the midst of an inconclusive
war. This historically unprecedented achievement was, curiously
enough, in the nature of one of the great hopes of the Lyrical Left.
"Nothing could be more awkward for a 'democratic' President than to be
faced with this cold, startling skepticism of youth, in the prosecution
of his war," wrote Randolph Bourne in 1917. Bourne saw in "the non-
mobilization of the younger intelligentsia" an "idealism" that could
not "be hurt by taunts of cowardice and slacking or kindled by the
slogans of capitalist democracy." In the legacy and the lesson the New
Left bequeathed to America lay the fulfillment of Bourne's prophecy:
If the country submissively pours month after month its wealth of life and
resources into the work of annihilation . . . bitterness will spread out like
a stain over the younger generation. Ii the enterprise goes on endlessly,
the work, so blithely undertaken for the defense of democracy, will have
crushed out the only genuinely precious thing in a nation, the hope and
ardent idealism of its youth.16

The New Left had been no less prescient in anticipating the domestic
crises that would convulse America. Many programs enunciated by SDS
in 1962. were later articulated by congressmen and senators who crit-
icized excessive military budgets and demanded that the government
address itself to social priorities. Thus, by forcing critical issues like
racism and poverty into the center of public debate, the New Left made
those issues politically safe. Moreover, by making America aware that 185
 youth was a growing political force to be reckoned with, it was instru-
mental in lowering the voting age to eighteen; and by exposing Amer-
ica's worship of technology, it helped make Americans more aware of
the peril to the environment. Although much of the theoretical criti-
cism of American society had been articulated by liberals like John
Kenneth Galbraith, it was the young radicals who challenged by deeds
the subtle methods of bureaucratic control, the ubiquitous manipula-
tion by advertisement, the deadly chambers of corporate life, and the
winking hypocrisy of conventional sexual morality. The New Left,
together with the hippies and the counter-culture, effectively called
into question the whole quality of American life by invoking a "new
consciousness."

THE "NEW CONSCIOUSNESS"

AND HERBERT MARCUSE
"The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to
introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives," wrote Emerson
of the 1830's. "The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had
become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was
a new consciousness." Almost every generational rebellion trumpets
itself as the bright dawn of a "new consciousness."17 Young radicals
of the sixties grew up to discover that consciousness was dead in Amer-
ica and that Americans had lost their freedom without knowing it.
This arrogant conviction could be traced through the ideas of some of
the intellectual heroes and instant gurus of the era. The New Left's
first major inspiration came from C. Wright Mills, a huge, scrappy
Texan who built his house with his own hands and commuted to his
teaching post at Columbia University on a motorcycle. Mills was the
best kind of scholar, a skeptic who never lost passion or vision, a radical
without illusions. A late veteran of the Old Left, he learned early in
his career that Marx's easy answers to nineteenth-century capitalism
collapsed before Weber's harder questions on twentieth-century post-
capitalism. From Mills, students learned of the ideological hegemony
of ruling elites, the myth of objective empirical research, and the need
186 to formulate a theory of sociology that would confront human relations
 l.

103 C. Wright Mills, skeptic and

scholar who came of political age
with the Old Left. Mills is one of
the few survivors of the political
thirties who gave intellectual direc-
tion to the emerging Left of the
sixties.

directly and morally. Two other intellectuals also shaped the awaken-
ing radical mind of the sixties. Paul Goodman exposed the idiocy of
urban government and the absurdity of programmed adolescence while
defending his Gestaltist faith in the spontaneous emotions of the young.
Eric Fromm gave a pseudoscientific legitimacy to old-fashioned ideas
like "love" and "goodness" and started students searching for the self
by developing a capacity for "relatedness." European existentialist
also had a liberating role. Having read Sartre, American students
learned that ultimate freedom is the ability to resist, to say "No." Hav-
ing read Camus' The Stranger-assigned reading for many entering
college freshmen-they learned the difference between legal moralism
and personal morality. 187
 As more and more students sensed the emptiness of everyday exis-
tence, their search for meaning led to at least three new avenues of
awareness. The tender-minded, having ascended from J. D. Salinger to
the supernatural speculations of Hermann Hesse and the cosmic con-
sciousness of Aldous Huxley, began exploring the deeper recesses of
mind. The jaded, graduating from Mad comics to the entropic world
of Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey, decided that to survive the rational-
ization of an irrational society, one might feign insanity. The radically
oriented, taking Mills' advice, translated personal or philosophical
problems into social causes. The first option led to hippieland: Haight-
Ashbury, Timothy Leary, tripping, and acid; and later, organic foods,
fasting, Lao-tzu, Hare Krishna, and Jesus Freaks. The second led to the
Pop Left: pornopolitics, Lenny Bruce, the Merry Pranksters, the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, yippies, redemptive genitality, and Reichian
orgone. The third led to the New Left: praxis and commitment, conflict
and struggle as the test of manhood and self, radicalization as conver-
sion, and Fanon's "identity won in action." But what the New Left
needed to justify its course of action to all other disaffected youth was
a philosophy that explained the causes of alienation and offered a solu-
tion to it. Herbert Marcuse provided both.
A scholarly philosopher close to seventy years of age, Marcuse looks
like a gentle, deflated Santa Claus and thinks like an angry Prometheus.
His role in contemporary American thought is remarkable, for he suc-
ceeded in revolutionizing what Americans assumed they had safely
domesticated-the ideas of Hegel and Freud. In nineteenth-century
America Hegelianism had become a philosophy of celebration (whit-
man) or a theology of reconciliation (Josiah Royce). And in the twenti-
eth century Freudianism became a progressive psychology of coopera-
tion and adjustment (Harry Stack Sullivan) or a heroic philosophy of
stoicism and tragedy (Phillip Rieff). In addition, both these systems
of thought had been discredited when some Americans erroneously
identified them with fascist absolutism and irrationalism, and Lhe Old
Left, as we saw, had rejected the dialectic as a species of German
mysticism.
In reviving Hegelianism, Marcuse restored the respectability of
188 dialectical reasoning, which illuminates the tension between the "is"
104 "Flower children" of the 1960's, some of those who found the answer to alienation in
mysticism, hallucination, and rapture, tendencies that seemed naively escapist to the New
Left.

and the "ought/' between what is given and what is potential, between
immediate appearance and ultimate reality. Hegel's concept of the
dialectic, Marcuse first pointed out in Reason and Revolution (1940) ,
denies predominance to anything by showing that everything changes.
Marcuse later revised Freud's central dictum that civilization requires
the repression of man's instincts. Basic repression of harmful biological
drives may be necessary for survival, Marcuse said, but "surplus re-
pression" is a contrived social phenomenon based upon capitalist
domination. Thus he drew a distinction between Freud's "pleasure
principle" and the "reality principle." Historically it was necessary
to defer immediate gratification and sublimate drives into productive
work because of the economic reality of scarcity. With the advent of
abundance, however, man's need to repress himself by performing 189
 joyless acts of labor is no longer necessary. The contradiction of modern
society is that it perpetuates the traditional "performance" ethos instead
of transforming work into play and redeeming sexual pleasure, and
thereby reunifying man's nature.
The abolition of repression is improbable within the Soviet Union
and impossible within the United States. In America, especially, tech-
nological rationality has created a status quo that "defies all transcend-
ence," wrote Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (1965). Every improve-
ment in the quantity of comfort "militates against qualitative change,"
for the "people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find
their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split level home, kitchen
equipment." Even the sexual revolution, Nlarcuse believes, serves only
to "desublimate" repressed tensions, to pacify the potentially discon-
tented; Playboy magazine supports the existing social order by creating
the illusion of fulfillment. American society can absorb all possible
opposition, tolerating moral deviance and political dissent but allow-
ing no real resistance. Unable to think dialectically, Americans have
become "one-dimensional," conditioned to accept the incomplete state
of existence as the highest possible state of being. The "is" has become
the "ought," the actual the possible. The "given" can neither be negated
nor transformed.
What, then, are the prospects for radical change in America? Marcuse
has never been entirely clear on this question. But in An Essay on Lib-
eration (1968) his earlier pessimism gives way to a glimmer of opti-
mism. Now it becomes clear that the Marcusean revolution will begin
esthetically, arising from the beautiful untouchables, the young,
deracinated intelligentsia and dropouts who have cultivated "the sensu-
ousness of long hair, of the body unsoiled by plastic cleanliness." Only
they are blessed with the "new sensibility of praxis," an esthetic vision
that descends from high culture "in desublimated 'lower,' and destruc-
tive forms, where the hatred of the young bursts into laughter and song,
mixing the barricades and the dance floor, love play and heroism. And
the young also attack the esprit de sérieux in the socialist camp: mini-
skirts against the apparatchiks, rock 'n' roll against Soviet Realism."
With this mythopoeic image of revolution, with this invocation of eros,
190 song, dance, play, and the beauty of festive youth, we are back with the
Lyrical Left. Curiously, like the rebels of 1913, Marcuse relies less on
Marxism than on "Aesthetic Form" as the subversive medium of "the
Great Refusal-the protest against that which is." Marcuse speculates,
as did the poets of 1913, that man may be endowed with a capacity to
make "the primary distinction between the beautiful and ugly, good
and bad." With the lyrical radicals he also maintains that the task of
overcoming repression "involves the demonstration of the inner con-
nection between pleasure, sensuousness, beauty, truth, art, and free-
dom," all of which presupposes an "aesthetic ethos" that makes the
"imagination" the liberating faculty of man. The "rebellion of the
young intelligentsia," advises Marcuse, indicates that the "right and the

41
;rrr~
105 Herbert Marcuse, scholar-
".e ly critic of the Protestant ethic
x and celebrant of sensual libera-
tion, is a leading philosopher of
¢-as-r
the New Left.

...
..
. . .. ...
 .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

106 and 107 Pop art oomnlents° (above) on plastic America-Edward Ruscha's Standard Station,
Amarillo, Texas, 1963-and (facing page) on racist America-Robert Indiana's Alabama 1965.

truth of imagination [may] become the demands of political action"

and the spark of social change. Finally, just as the Lyrical Left rejected
all dualisms between science and fact and art and value, Marcuse in-
sists that "the historical achievement of science and technology has
rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks." Despite
his heavy Teutonic prose and I-Iegelian logic, Marcuse is a poet who
shares the Lyrical Left's conviction that political issues can be given
esthetic dimensions and that freedom is the realization of beauty as
well as justice. Eastman entitled his memoirs "Love and Revolution;"
Marcuse may very well entitle his "Eros and Liberation." "The true
Left," Raymond Aron has written, "is that which continues faithfully
to invoke, not liberty or equality, but fraternity-in other words,
love."18
But historically the "true Left" has also faithfully invoked class
struggle and the triumph of the proletariat. Marcuse departed from this
tradition. The proletariat "is no longer qualitatively different from any
192 other class and hence no longer capable of creating a qualitatively
.......
 different society," he wrote in 1965. Yet Marcuse also maintained that
the student Left could scarcely be a revolutionary force by itself. At most
it "can articulate the needs and aspirations of the silent masses" and
possibly "induce radical change" as militant students later "take their
places as political and social forces in the society." After "les evane-
ments" in France in 1968, Marcuse was asked:

Do you believe in the possibility of revolution in the United States?

Absolutely not.
Why not?
Because there is no collaboration between the students and the workers,
not even on the level on which it occurred in France . . . I cannot imagine
. . . a revolution without the working class. 19

Oracular, ponderous, erudite, Marcuse hovered like a monad over the

mind of the New Left. It was a measure of his integrity and pessimism
that he did not go indiscriminately whoring after the young-as did
some who spoke in his name. Yet Marcuse's assessment of the political
situation in America was nothing more than a restatement of the pre-
dicament that confronted the American Left at the turn of the century.
Once again we have a young radical intelligentsia without a radical
proletariat. Although he recognized the profound cultural cleavage
between radical students and the workers, Marcuse still insisted the two
must collaborate. In the past the Left at least enjoyed the comfort of
an illusion. In the late nineteenth century, socialist intellectuals could
look forward to the growth of a revolutionary working class because, in
Maridst terms, the proletariat was the absolute antithesis of the bour-
geois order. Before the First World War, as we have seen, the question
was whether the intellectuals could become a genuine revolutionary
class. Today this question has been transmuted.
If radicalism means "going to the root," then the most radical ele-
ments in contemporary America ar°e the hippies and their counter-cul-
ture. For it was the hippies who questioned the ultimate rationality of
industrial society and the ultimate meaning of Christian civilization.
Yet it is highly doubtful that these mystical mutants will become a force
of the Left, as Marcuse assumes. The counter-culture is not the affirma-
194 tion of Marxism but its repudiation. The affluent children of tech-
enology represent a challenge not only to capitalism but to the basic
philosophical and political assumptions of historic Marxism: the valid-
ity of material reality, the imperative of organized, collective action,
and the inalienable quality of work as the highest source of life's mean-
ing and value. The New Left, presently at a critical juncture in its un-
certain career, must thus confront what no other American Left had to
face on so vast a scale: a cultural radicalism that is beyond radicalism,
a new consciousness that seeks not so much to realize but to obliterate
the western idea of consciousness. The Left, which historically signified
"negation/' has itself been negated. For it must now come to grips with a
cultural phenomenon that desires not to transform reality but to trans-
cend it. That the New Left can deal with the paradoxes of alienation
better than the Old Left dealt with the contradictions of capitalism
remains to be seen.90

Notes
black Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New York: Signet, 1966), p. 43; Tom Hayden,
Rebellion and Repression (New York: World Publishers, 1969) ; the student is quoted
in I. Glenn Gray, "Salvation on the Campus: Why Existentialism Is Capturing the
Students," I-Ia1per's, CCXXV (May, 1965), 57.
2 Dennis Wrong, "The American Left and Cuba," Commentary, XXXIII (Feb, 1962) ,
93-103.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 42-43.
4 Leslie Fiedler, "The New Mutants," Partisan Review, XXXII (Fall, 1965), 509-25;
Ice Ferrandino, "Rock Culture and the Development of Social Consciousness," Radi-
ca] America, III (Nov., 1969), 23-48.

5"Symposium: Confrontation: The New Left and the Old," (Tom Hayden, Ivanhoe
Donaldson, Dwight Macdonald, and Richard Rovers), American Scholar, XXXVI
( u 8 . i 1967), 567-88.
Glcrcmy Larncr, quoted in "The Young Radicals; A Symposium," Dissent, IX (Spring,
1962), 129-63; Clark Kissinger, quoted in Steven Kelman, "The Feud Among the
Radicals," Harper's, CCXXXII (Lune, 1966), 67-79; Leslie Fiedler, "Reflections on
Writers and Writing in the Thirties," in The Thirties, eds. Morton I. Frisch and
Martin Diamond (De Kalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 44-67.
7 Randolph Bourne, "Youth" and "Medievalisrn in the Colleges," in The World of
Randolph Bourne, ed. Lillian Schlissel (New York: Dutton, 1965), pp. 3-15, 64-68;
Walter Weyl, Tired Radicals (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921).
8Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hel] of It (New York: Simon et Schuster, 1970);
Ierry Rubin, Do It! A Revolutionary Manifesto (New York- Simon 81 Schuster, 1970) ;
Irving Howe, "New Styles of 'Leftism/" Dissent, XII (Spring, 1965), 295-323.
9New£ield, A Prophetic II/Iinority, pp. 48-82. 195
 10 Andrew Kopland, "The New Left: Chicago and After," New York Review of Books,
IX (Sept. 28, 1967), 3-5.
11 Bobby Scale, quoted in Theodore Draper, The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism
(New YO1'k: Viking, 1970), p. 108.
12Jean-Francois Revel, Without Marx or Iesus, trans. lack Bernard (New York:
Doubleday, 1971), pp. 225-26.
13Michae1 Ferber and Staughton Lynd, The Resistance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971);
Ierry Rubin, quoted in Robert Nisbet, "Who Killed the Student Revolution?" En-
counter, XXXIV (Feb., 1970), 10-18; see also James P. O'Brien, "The Development of
the New Left," Annals, American Academy of Political and Social Science, CCCXCV
(May, 1971), 15-25.
14Iack Weinberg and Jack Gerson, The Split in SDS (New York: International
Socialists, 1969), pamphlet; Young Socialist, XII (May, 1969); Spa rtacist, no. 13
(Aug.-Sept., 1969); The Militant, XXIII (luly 4, 1969) .
15 David Horowitz, "Revolutionary Karma vs. Revolutionary Politics," Ramparts,
IX (Ii/lar., 1971), 27-33.
16Bourne, "Below the Battle," in War and the Intellectuals, pp. 15-21.
17 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," in
The American Transcendentalists, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Doubleday, 1957),
pp, 5-7.
18 Aron, Opium of the Intellectuals, p. 24.
19 Herbert Marcuse, quoted in Robert W. Marks, The Meaning of Marcuse (New
York: Ballantine, 1970), pp. 92, 97; for Marcuse's influence on the New Left, see
Mitchell Franklin, "The Irony of the Beautiful Soul of Marcuse," Telos, no. 6 (Fall,
1970), 3-35; Paul Piccone and Alex Delfini, "Marcuse's Heideggerian Marxism,"
Telos, no. 6 (Fall, 1970), 36-46; Ronald Aronson, "Dear Herbert," and Paul Breines,
"Notes on Marcuse and the Movement," Radical America, IV (Apr., 1970), 3-18, 2.9-
32; Paul Breines et al., eds., Critical Interruptions: New Left Perspectives on Herbert
Marcuse (New York' Herder & Herder, 1970) .
9J0On the paradoxes in the Left's approach to the problem of alienation, see Iohn P.
Diggins, "Thoreau, Marx, and the 'Riddle' of Alienation."

196
PHOTO CREDITS

PAGE
4 The Bettmann Archive 65 Brown Brothers
5 Dennis Stock/Magnum 74 The Philadelphia Museum of
6 The Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Art: The Louise and Walter
Foundation Arensberg Collection '50-134-59
8 The Granger Collection 75 Museum of the City of New York
11 Top-The Granger Collection. 76 The Royal Museum of Fine Arts,
Bottom-Charles Moore/Black I. Rump Collection, Copenhagen.
Star Permission S.P.A.D.E.M. 1973 by
12 The Granger Collection French Reproduction Rights.
13 The Granger Collection 77 The Bettmann Archive
15 Brown Brothers 81 The Ben and Beatrice Goldstein
16 Ted Cowell/Black Star Foundation
19 The Granger Collection 82 The Granger Collection
20/21 © 1966 Jules Feiffer. Courtesy 83 The National Archives
Publishers-Hall Syndicate 84/85 The National Archives
The Library of Congress
2.2. 86 Museum of the City of New York
24 Top-Culver Pictures. Bottom- 87 The National Archives
The Bettmann Archive 89 The Ben and Beatrice Goldstein
29 The Granger Collection Foundation
32 Top, left-NAACP. Top, right- 91 Cartoon by Hugo Gellert from
Photoworld. Bottom-The Ben New Masses The Ben and
and Beatrice Goldstein Beatrice Goldstein Foundation
Foundation 93 Ben Shahn. The Passion of Sacco
33 Mrs. Max Eastman and Vanzetti. (1931-32). From
34 Photoworld The Sacco-Vanzetti series of 2.3
35 The Granger Collection paintings. Tempera on canvas
40 Sovfoto 84% X 48. Collection Whitney
42 The Library of Congress Museum of American Art. Gift
43 UPI of Edith and Milton Lowenthal
45 Museum of the City of New York in memory of Iuliana Force.
47 The Tamiment Institute 94 UPI
49 The New York Public Library 96 The National Archives
Collection 98 Mrs. Max Eastman
50 The Granger Collection 100 UPI
53 The Granger Collection 103 The Ben and Beatrice Goldstein
55 The Granger Collection Foundation
56 Brown Brothers 109 Top-Dorothea Lange, The
57 The Granger Collection Library of Congress. Bottom-
58 The Granger Collection Russell Lee, The Library of
59 The Library of Congress Congress
62 The Library of Congress 114 The Museum of Modern Art.
64 The Granger Collection firs. Simon Guggenlheinl Fund 197
 119 The Ben and Beatrice Goldstein 158 Bill Owens/BBM Associates
Foundation 159 Jeffrey Blankfort/Camera Press,
122 UPI London and Pictorial Parade
124 The National Archives 162 Burk PUzzle/Magnum
125 Wide World 163 Dennis Stock/Magnurn
126 The Ben and Beatrice Goldstein 167 Marc Riboud/Magnum
Foundation 168 Marc Riboud/Magnum
130/131 On extended loan to the 170 Ollie Atkins
Museum of Modern Art 171 Harvey Stein
from the artist 174 Bruno Barbey/Magnum
132 Culver Pictures 175 Susan Sontag and Dugald
133 UPI Sterrner. THE ART OF
134 From a series of caricatures REVOLUTION: CASTRO'S
made at the First American CUBA. 1959-70. © 1971
Writers Conference by William McGraw-Hill Co. By permission.
Gropper, Phil Wolfe and Russell 178 Jeffrey Blankfort/BBM
T. Limbach. NEW MASSES, Associates
May 7, 1933 179 John Filo, The Valley Daily
135 The Washington Post News Tarentum, Pa.
139 The Bettmann Archive 180 Wide World
143 Left-IPA News photo, Editorial 181 Roger Malloch/Magnum
Photocolor Archives. Right- 182 Shames/Black Star
Doubleday st Co. 184 Harvey Stein
146 Left-Photo by Edward Leigh, 187 Pictorial Parade
courtesy Random House. Right - 189 Susan Ylvisaker/Ieroboam
Wide World. Bottom-Photo by 191 AFP from Pictorial Parade
Fabian Bachrach, courtesy Har- 192 Collection Charles Cowles,
court Brace Jovanovich New York
149 Pictorial Parade 193 Collection Walter A. Netsch,
156 UPI Chicago

198
 Index

Aaron, Daniel, 116 Art

Abolitionists, 10 Old Left on, 119-20
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 129-30 and politics, 75-78
Adams, Henry, 37, 145 Associationists, 51
Adams, Iohn, 12 Auden, W. H., 135
Affluence
and Marxist economics, 140 Babbitt, Irving, 10
and middle-class alienation, 157 Bay of Pigs invasion, 159
AFL. See American Federation of Labor Beard, Charles, 84, 145
Agee, James, 108 Beat poets, 157
Agrarian radicalism. See Populism Bedford-Jones, H., 127
Alienation, 150 Bell, Daniel, 142, 151
and New Left, 157-62, 195 Bellamy, Edward, 52, 53, 63
"America and the New Era," 171 Berger, Victor, 56, 57, 83
"American exceptionalism," 95, 123, Bergson, Henri, 30, 77
145 , Berkeley Free Speech movement, 156
American Federation of Labor (AFL), Berk ran, Alexander, 90
45-46 Black Americans and Communist
Comintern attitude toward, 99 Party of 1930's, 126. See also
American history, Marxist interpreta- Black militants and New Left
tions of, 116, 145-48 i "Black Belt" doctrine, 126
American Railway Union, 63 Black militants and New Left, 173-
74, 176
101 Black Panther Party, 174, 176
American Workers Party, 121 factionalism in, 182
Anarchists, 58 Black-power movement, 173-76
and Bolshevik revolution, 90 Bolshevik revolution, 19
Russian, 96 impact on Lyrical Left, 88-92
in Spain, 130 and John Reed, 98-99
Antiwar movement Boorstin, Daniel J., 145, 146, 147, 148
and First World War, 81-84 Boudin, Louis, 82
May Day mobilization of 1971, 180 "Bourgeois intellectuals," 29. See also
and New Left, 177, 179, 180 Left intellectuals
in 1934, 127 Bourne, Randolph, 44, 77, 84, 85-86,
See also Vietnam war 87, 88, 165, 185
Appeal to Reason (Weyland), 13 Brook Farm, 23, 50, 51-52, 69
Aron, Raymond, 3 Brown, Norman O., 161 199
 Bruce, Lenny, 188 Communes
Bryan, William Jennings, 41, 43, 63-64 of 1830's and 1840's, 50
Bunyan, Paul, 147 of hippies, 161
Burnham, lames, 123, 140-41, 150-51 See also Brook Farm
Communism
Calhoun, John C., 10 in American communes, 50
Calverton, V. F., 110, 111, 120 and Depression, 112-15
Cambodia, invasion of, 179-80 and individual rebellion, 120-21
Campus protests and Vietnam war, of Old Left, 111-12
177, 179-80 Communist, The, 123
Cannon, James P., 123 Communist International. See
Capitalism Comintern
and birth of Left, 4 Communist Labor Party (CLP), 92
and Communist Party, 115 Communist Party of the Left
conservative critics of, 10 Opposition. See Trotsk3dsts
and fascism, 114-15 Communist Party of the Right
Marxist critiques of, 138, 140 Opposition. See Lovestonites
and mass democracy, 8-9 Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA).
and populism, 43-44 and Black Americans, 126
and working-class values, 108, 110 and Comintern directives, 94-95
Carmichael, Stokely, 173 formation of, 92
Castro, Fidel, 159, 160, 167, 168 and impact of Russo-German
Caute, David, 9 nonagression pact, 135-36
Christian existentialism, 142-43 and labor movement, 123-26
Christian socialists, 4 in l920's, 95
Christianity and Lyrical Left, 78 in 1930's, 115-16, 123-28
CIO and Communist Party, 124-25 Popular Front policies of, 128-29
Civil-rights movement, 10 and Progressive Labor Party, 171
and New Left, 9, 155, 168-69 and rise of Hitler, 114-15
Class conflict, 8, 136-37, 145 in "third Period," 123-28
Class consciousness, 23, 48-49 in underground period, 92
CLP. See Communist Labor Party Conservatism
Cold War of American working class, 44-45
impact on Old Left, 151-52 and fear of class war, 8
and Kennedy Administration, 159 Left as opposition to, 15-16
"Colored Alliance," 41 Coolidge era, 19
Columbia University, 73, 84 Corey, Lewis, 116, 137
Comintern, 90-91, 102 Counterculture, 160-62
and American communist parties, Cowley, Malcolm, 73, 110, 134
94-95 CPUSA. See Communist Party U.S.A.
and Cohn Reed, 99 Crisis of the Middle Class, The
and Popular Front policy, 128-29 (Corey), 137
and rise of Hitler, 114-15 Cuba, 20
and Spanish Civil War, 130 New Left attitude toward, 167
Committee for Cultural Freedom, 135 Cultural rebellion, 23, 25, 75-78
200 Committee on Public Information, 85 Culture and Crisis, 123
Daily Worker, 10, 123 Dual unionism, 124
Daley, Richard, 181 DuBois, W. E. B., 126
Dana, Harold C., 84 DuBois Clubs of America, 172
Darrow, Clarence, 67 Duncan, Isadora, 85, 86
Debs, Eugene V., 41, 60, 63-65, 65, Dupes, F. W., 110
95, 121, 177 Durkheim, Emile, 4
on Bolshevik revolution, 89-90 Dylan, Bob, 172
on First World War, 83
DeLeon, Daniel, 29, 30, 47, 56-57, Eastman, Max, 25, 31, 33, 33, 34, 36,
65-66, 67, 95, 110, 121 68, 73, 75, 78, 87, 100, 110, 119-
DeLeonists and Bolshevik revolution, 20, 149, 165-66, 192
89 background of, 100-01
Dell, Floyd, 25, 74, 80, 87, 120, 165, on Big Bill Haywood, 68, 69
166 and dialectical materialism, 104-05
Democracy disillusionment of, 100-05
attitudes of Left toward, 7-9 on Eugene Debs, 64-65
and critiques of Marxism, 140-42 on First World War, 85
and dissent, 10 and IWW, 79
as threat to capitalism, 8-9 and Marxism, 101-02
See also Liberty and The Masses, 80
Democratic Party on Russian Revolution, 88
primaries of 1968, 160 in Soviet Union, 102-03
trade unionist support for, 63 "Economic and Philosophic Manu-
Dennis, Lawrence, 10 scripts" (Marx), 150
Depression, 19 Economic Research and Action
impact on youth, 126-27 Project, 171
impact on Left, 107, 111-12, 118, Economics and Marzdsm, 9-10, 138,
164 140
reaction to, 108, 110 Elections
and Soviet Russia, 114, 115 of 1840, 8
union activity during, 123-24 of 1912, 60
Dewey, John, 34, 36, 85 of 1920, 64
and Moscow trials, 132 and Peoples' Party, 41
Dialectic, critiques of, 104-05, 149-50 and Socialist Party in l930's, 121-22
Dissent, 151 Eliot, T. S., 110, 111, 144
Dissent tradition of Left, 10, 12 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 50-51, 52, 75, 186
Dodge, Mabel, 74, 75, 77, 78, 97, 98 Engels, Friedrich, 49-50, 144
DoS Passos, John, 64, 67, 92, 110, 115, Equality, attitude of Left toward, 7
125 Espionage Act (1917), 84
on Communist Party policy in Essay on Liberation, An (Marcuse), 190
Spanish Civil War, 131-32 European Left, 118
on democratic socialism, 122 and democracy, 7-9
Draft resisters, 10 and fascism, 115
Draper, Theodore, 47, 99-100, 12. political ideals of, 5
Dreiser, Theodore, 125 Everest, Wesley, 59
Dreyfus affair, 28 Existentialism, 150 201
 Fabian socialism, 78 Goodman, Paul, 187
Family, Old Left attitude toward, 25 Great Northern Railroad, 63
Fanon, Franz, 174, 188 Greeley, Horace, 53
Farrell, James T., 108 Greenwich Village, 74
Fascism Guevara, Che, 174
attitude of Left toward, 114-15
impact on intellectuals, 141-42 Hacker, Louis, 116, 145
as Old Left issue, 20 Harbinger, The, 51-52
Federalist Party, 8 Hard Times: An Ora] History of the
Feminism, 165-66 Great Depression (Terkel), 107
Feyer, Lewis, 148-49 Harrington, Michael, 151, 157, 164
Fiedler, Leslie, 162, 165 Harrison, William Henry, 8
First International, 81 Hartz, Louis, 145, 146, 147-48
First World War and Lyrical Left, Harvard Socialist Club, 79
7, 19 Hayden, Tom, 158, 159, 160, 164-65
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 111 Haymarket Riot, 57
Fitzhugh, George, 10 Haywood, William D. (Big Bill), 60,
Five-Year Plans, 112 62, 67-68, 69, 95, 100
Folk-rock festivals, 161 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 104,
Ford, Henry, 112 188
Ford, James, 123 Hegelianism and Herbert Marcuse,
Foster, William Z., 41, 123 188-89
Fourier, Charles, 50, 51, 53 Heller, Ioseph, 188
Fourth International, 81 Hemingway, Ernest, 110, 13 l
Fraina, Louis, 82, 90, 92, 95 Heiberg, Will, 122-23, 142, 143, 151
France, May 1968 uprising in, 183 Hero in History, The (Hook), 149-50
Frank, Waldo, 133, 134 Hesse, Hermann, 188
Freedom Riders, 169 Hicks, Granville, 116, 134, 135-36
Freeman, Joseph, 121 Hill, lames I., 63
French Revolution, 5, 132 Hill, Joe, 59
French socialism, 30 Hillquit, Morris, 46, 47, 82, 83, 87,
Freud, Sigmund, 77, 144, 166, 188, 189 89, 95, 121
From Bryan to Stalin (Foster), 41 Hippies, 186, 188
Frontier and American worldng-class and communalism, 161
conservatism, 44 compared with New Left, 161-62
History of the Russian Revolution
Galbraith, Iohn Kenneth, 140, 186 (Trotsky), 107-08
George, Henry, 52, 63 Hitler, Adolf, 114, 128, 134, 144
Ghent, W. J., 80 Ho Chi Minh, 174
Ginsberg, Allen, 172 Hotter, Eric, 141
Gitlow, Benjamin, 92 Hoffman, Abbie, 165
Gold, Mike, 110, 111, 115, 120 Hofstadter, Richard, 145, 146, 147, 152
Goldman, Emma, 90, 95, 96, 166 Hook, Sidney, 114-15, 116, 148, 149,
Gomperism, 66 150
Gompers, Samuel, 45, 46-49, 63 Hoover, Herbert, 112, 145
202 Goodman, Andrew, 155 Howe, Irving, 117, 164
 I*

Howells, William Dean, 52, 53 Kronstadt uprising, 96

Huxley, Aldous, 188 Krupp, Adolph, 138

Imperialism and First World War, 82 Labor unions. See American Federation
Industrial Workers of the World of Labor; Industrial Workers of
(IWW), 58-60, 67, 69, 79 the World; Trade unions
and Bolshevik revolution, 89 Lafargue, Paul, 29
and Communist Party, 96 Lamont, Thomas, 112-13
expulsion from Socialist Party, 60 LaMonte, Robert Rives, 31
repression against, 84-85 Lange, Dorothea, 108
Industrialization and birth of Left, Larger Aspects of Socialism, The
4, 23, 25 (Walling), 26
"Instrumentalism," 34 Lasch, Christopher, 23
Intellectual class, 23, 25. See also Laslett, Iohn, 63
Left intellectuals Lassalle, Ferdinand, 55, 66
Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 78 "Law and order," 181
International Socialist Review, The, Lawson, John Howard, 115-16
29 League for Industrial Democracy, 121
Internationalism and Left, 81 League of radons, 128
IWW. See Industrial Workers of the League of Professional Groups, 123
World Left intellectuals
and Big Bill Haywood, 68
James, Henry, 144, 145 and Communist Party, 115-16,
James, William, 17, 35, 36, 77, 116, 123-24
147,150 conflict with Marxian socialists, 28-31
Jaurés, Jean, 30 criticisms of, 29-30
Jefferson, Thomas, 7, 129, 145 and Depression, 110
Jefferson Airplane, 172 deradicalization of, 141
Johnson, Lyndon, 160, 185 and fascism, 141-42
Johnson Administration, 177 and First World War, 84-86
historical consciousness of, 34-38
Kapital, Das (Marx), 101, 136 impact of Stalinism on, 133-34,
Kazin, Alfred, 145 140-42
Kennedy, John F., 158-59 and Marxism, 116-17
Kennedy, Robert, 160 and Moscow trials, 131-35
Kennedy Administration and New of l930's, 110-11
Left, 158-59, 171 origins of term, 2.8
Kesey, Ken, 188 and populists, 41-42
Keynesian economics and Marxism, and "scientific socialists," 37
138, 140 and socialism with culture, 51
Kierkegaard, Sorer, 142 and Trotskyists, 123
King, Martin Luther, 151, 173, 174 and utopian tradition, 49-54
Kissinger, Clark, 164, 165 and workers, 20-23, 25
Knights of Labor, 45, 46 See also Eastman, Max; Lippmann,
Koestler, Arthur, 120 Walter; Lyrical Left; Walling,
Kronenberger, Louis, 144 William English 2.3
 A

"Le)'t-Wing" Cornrnunism: An Infan- and cultural fragmentation, 23, 25

tile Disorder (Lenin), 94, 95 and First World War, 7, 81-88
"Left-Wing Manifesto" (Fraina), 90 and Herbert Marcuse, 190-92
Lenin, Vladimir lich, 66, 88, 91, 92, ideology of, 14
95, 97, 150, 164 issues of, 19
on class consciousness, 48-49 and politics and art, 75-78
death of, 103 and populism, 40-44
and Kronstadt uprising, 96 publications of, 79-80
Max Eastman on, 101 style and tone of, 73-75
Lerner, Max, 137 See also Left intellectuals
Lewis, John L., 124
Liberal Center, 15 McCarthy, Eugene, 160
and Soviet communism, 113 McCarthyism, 151, 172, 185
Liberals McCoy, Horace, 108
attitude of New Left toward, 164 Macdonald, Dwight, 110, 164
Left as opposition to, 15-16 MacDonald, J. Ramsey, 67-68
Max Eastman on, 37-38 Maclver, Robert, 21-22
and Popular Front, 129 McKinley, William, 58
and theory of "social fascism," 128 Malatesta, Enrico, 58
Liberation, 167 Mao Tse-tung, 167, 174
Liberator, The, 102 Marcuse, Herbert, 105, 147, 191
Liberty, 127 influence on New Left, 188-92,
Liberty, attitude of Left toward, 5, 6, 7 194-95
Lippmann, Walter, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, Marx, Karl, 7, 17, 30, 30, 45, 49, 101,
76, 79, 85, 86, 141 102, 144, 164, 177, 186
Lipset, Seymour Martin, 137, 141 attitude toward intellectuals, 29
Literature and Marxism, 143-45 and Hegelianism, 104
Little, Frank, 84 on ideology, 14
London, lack, 39, 78, 83 influence on Eugene V. Debs, 64
Long, Huey, 122 and working class, 39-40
Looking Backward (Bellamy), 52 Marx and Lenin: The Science of
"Love and Revolution" (Eastman), 192 Revolution (Eastman), 104
Lovestone, lay, 122, 132-33 Marxism
Lovestonites, 122-23 and "American exceptionalism," 95
Lukacs, Georg, 120 and American historians, 145-48
Lynd, Helen, 108 Americanization of, 102
Lynd, Robert, 108 and black intellectuals, 126
Lynd, Staughton, 124-25 and Black Panthers, 174
Lyrical Left and counterculture, 194-95
and appeal to socialism, 78-79 economic critique of, 138-40
and Big Bill Haywood, 67-68 and fascism, 114-15
and Bolshevik revolution, 88-92 impact on Socialist Party, 54, 56-60,
characteristics of, 17 63
compared with influence on intellectuals of 198'0's,
New Left, 165-66, 184-85 116-17
204 Old Left, 117-21 introduction into United States, 54
 and Left intellectuals, 28-31, 78, NAACP. See National Association for
143-45 the Advancement of Colored
and materialistic values, 47-49 People
and Max Eastman, 101-02 Nation, 113
and New Left, 14, 150, 167-68, 172 National Association for the
and Old Left, 14, 17, 116-21 Advancement of Colored People
philosophical critiques of, 148-50 (NAACP), 31
political critiques of, 140-42 National Conference for a New
and populism, 44 Politics, 173
and rationalism, 13 National Conference for a United
sociological critiques of, 136-38 Front Against Fascism, 176
theological critiques of, 142-43 National Student League, 127
.See also Marrdsts Nationalism and First World War,
Marxism is it Science (Eastman), 149 87-88
Marxist Quarterly, 116, 148 . Nazi-Soviet pact, 20
Marxists, 66 impact on Communist Party, 136
and First World War, 82-83, 86-87 Negation and Left, 16-20
and populists, 41-44 New Deal, attitude of Left toward, 138
and syndicalists, 59-60 "New consciousness," 186-92, 194-95
Masses, The, 32, 33, 79-80, 95, 101 New Frontier, 158
compared with New Masses, 119-20 "New Intellectuals, The" (La Monte),
May 2nd Movement, 183 31
Melville, Herman, 144, 145 New International, 123
Mencken, H. L., 37 New Left, 105
Middle class as agency of social change, 176-77
and Depression, 108 attitudes toward constitutional
and fascism, 115 liberties, 7
and Marxist theory of class and black militants, 173-74, 176
conflict, 136-38 and C. Wright Mills, 186-87
and youth counterculture, 166 and civil-rights movement, 168-69
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 74 compared with hippies, 161-62
Miller, Henry, 157 compared with Lyrical Left, 105,
Mills, C. Wright, 18, 151, 171, 186, 165-66, 184
187, 188 compared with Old Left, 18-20
Minorities and New Left, 9, 177 and cultural alienation, 160-62
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,173 decline of, 176-77, 179-86
Mississippi Summer Project, 169 and democracy, 9
Modern Monthly, 148, 166-67 extremism in, 183-84
Modem Quarterly, 110 factionalisrn in, 182-83
Mosca, Gaetano, 140 and Herbert Marcuse, 188-92, 194-
Moscow trials, 20, 129, 131-35 95
Most, Johann, 58 hippies as allies of, 162
Muste, A. J., 121 issues of, 20
"My Father Is a Liar!" 127 and Marxism, 14, 150, 167-68
"Mystery of John Reed, The" (Draper), and middle-class alienation,
99-100 157-62 205
 New Left (Cont) relations with New Left, 150-52,
and offshoots of Old Left, 172-73 162, 164-68
origins of, 155-57 and Spanish Civil War, 129-31
Progressive Labor Party, 171-72 On Native Grounds (Kazin), 145
relations with Old Left, 13, 150- One Dimensional Man (Marcuse], 190
52, 162, 164-68 Oneal, lames, 89
repression of, 180-82 Other America, The (Harrington), 157
and SDS, 169, 171
and social change, 5 Pacifism in l930's, 127
and social issues, 185-86 Padmore, George, 126
and theory, 164-65 Paine, Thomas, 12, 13, 129
and "third world," 148, 159 Pareto, Vilfredo, 140
and Vietnam war, 177, 179, 180, Parrington, Vernon L., 145
184-85 Partisan Review, 110, 144, 151
New Masses, 110, 136, 166-67 Peace Corps, 159
compared with The Masses, 119-20 Peace and Freedom Party, 174
"New middle class," 137-38 Pentagon papers, 185
New Republic, 113 Peoples' Party, 41
New Review, The, 31, 33, 79-80 Phillips, William, 110, 111, 144
"New working class," 176 Philosophy and critiques of Marxism,
Newark riot, 173 148-50
Newfield, lack, 157, 169 Pinkerton Agents, 67
Newton, Huey, 174 PL. See Progressive Labor Party
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 142, 143, 151 Plekhanov, Georgi, 95
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 31, 77, 161 Police and "hard hat" attack on
Nomad, Max, 57-58 student demonstrators, 179
Not Guilty, 132 Political power
Noyes, Iohn Humphrey, 50 and Marxists, 140-42
and utopian socialists, 52
Ochrana, 92 Politics
"Ode to Higher Education," 127 of American Left, 15-16
Old Left and art, 75-78
attitude toward family, 25 and utopian socialists, 52
and communism, 111- 12 Poor and New Left, 176-77
compared with Lyrical Left, 117-21 Pop Left, 188
compared with New Left, 18-20, Popular Front, 128-29
156-57, 185 Populism, 41-44
components of, 121-23 Populists and Socialist Party, 63
composition of, 110-11 Pornopolitics, 188
deradicalization of, 17-18 "Port Huron Statement," 169, 171
issues for, 19-20 POUM, 130
and Lyrical Left, 105 Pound, Ezra, 10, 24, 25, 37, 111
and Marxism, 17, 116-21 Pravda, 10
New Left offshoots of, 172-73 Preface to Politics, A (Lippmann), 76
206 and rationalism, 13 Progress and Poverty (George), 52
Progressive Labor Party (PL), 171-72 Rieff, Phillip, 188
and SDS, 183 Ripley, George, 50, 51
and Vietnam war, 173 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 128
Progressivism and After (Walling), 79 Roszak, Theodore, 161
Proletarian art, 68, 143-44 Royce, Josiah, 188
Proletariat. See Worldng class Rubin, Jerry, 165, 180
Protestant ethic Russell, Charles E., 84
and counterculture, 161 Russo-German nonaggression pact.
and populism, 43 See Nazi-Soviet pact
Public Philosophy, The (Lippmann), 141 Rustin, Bayard, 164
Pullman strike, 64 Rothenberg, Charles, 92
Puritan antinomians, 10
Pushkin, Aleksander, 101 Salinger, J. D., 188
Santayana, George, 3, 35
Racial oppression, 20 Sartre, Jean Paul, 150
See also Civil-rights movement Savio, Mario, 105
Radek, Karl, 99 Schactman, Max, 95, 123
Rahv, Phillip, 110, 111, 144 Schuster, Max Lincoln, 73
Ramparts, 167 "Scientific socialists," 37. See also
Rationalism and Left, 12-14 Marxism; Marxists
Reason and Revolution (Marcuse), 189 Scottsboro trials, 126
Reason, Social Myths and Democracy SDS. See Students for a Democratic
(Hook), 149 Society
Rebels, compared with revolutionaries, Sedition Act (1918), 84
120-21 Segregation and New Left, 156, 157.
Red Guard, 167 See also Civil-rights movement
Red Scare (1919), 19, 92 Sellars, Roy Wood, 150
Reed, john, 66, 78-79, 80, 89, 92, 98, Sexual morality of New Left and
101, 102, 105, 165 Lyrical Left compared, 166
disillusionment with communism, Simons, A. M., 29, 83
96-100 Since Lenin Died (Eastman), 103
and First World War, 85-86 Sinclair, Upton, 82, 83, 122, 129
on his family, 25 Social change
Reforms, 66 attitudes of Left and Right toward,
Reich, Wilhelm, 161, 188 3-5
"Religion of Patriotism, The" and Left, 16-17
(Eastman), 87 and New Left, 176-77
Repression and utopian communes, 52
and First World War, 83-85 Social classes, categorization of Left
McCarthyism, 151, 172, 185 and Right by support of, 21-22.
of New Left, 180-82 "Social fascism" theory, 128
Revolu tionary Socialism (FraMa), 92 Social origin and political ideology,
Revolutionary Youth Movement, 183 2.5
Revolutionists, compared with reform- Social problems, attitude of Left
ers, 87 toward, 16-17 207
 Socialism Sombart, Werner, 140
attitudes of Left intellectuals Sorel, Georges, 67
toward, 31, 78-79 Soviet Union
attitudes of populists toward, 43 during Depression, 114
and democracy, 9, 36 and Ethiopian War, 126
Eugene V. Debs' conversion to, 64 impact on Old Left, 112-15
methods for attaining, 66 and social fascism theory, 128
and New Left, 159 See also Bolshevik revolution
and role of radical intellectuals, 29 SP. See Socialist Party
See also Utopian socialists Spanish Civil War, 20, 129-31
"Socialism and the Intellectuals" Spargo, John, 30, 82
(Lafargue), 29 Spock, Benjamin, 173
Socialist-communist split, 19 Spontaneity, 49, 59-60
Socialist Labor Party, 121 Stalin, Joseph, 112, 118
Socialist Party (SP) and Leon Trotsky, 102, 103
and AFL, 46-47 and Moscow trials, 131
and Big Bill Haywood, 67-68 and Nazi-Soviet pact, 133
and Bolshevik revolution, 90-92 See also Stalinism
and Daniel DeLeon, 65-66 Stalinism, 20
and elections, 121-22 and fascism, 118
and Eugene V. Debs, 63-65 and Lovestonites and Trotskyists,
expulsion of foreign-language 123
federations of, 90, 91-92 impact on Old Left, 151
and First World War, 81-88 and Marxism, 140-42
growth and decline of, 60, 63 "State, The" (Bourne), 87, 88
Left wing of, 90-91 State and Revolution (Lenin), 66, 88,
and Marxism, 54, 56-60, 63 95
in 1930's, 121 Staunnerberg, Frank, 67
Russian Federation of, 90 Steffens, Lincoln, 90, 95, 97
and Third International, 90-91 Steinbeck, Iohn, 108
and violence, 60 Stevenson, Adlai, 159
and Wobblies, 60 Stokes, J. G. Phelps, 84
Socialist press Stranger, The (Camus), 187
in early 1900's, 60 Strikes
U.S. Post Office banning of, 84 and Lyrical Left, 75
Socialist Study Club, Columbia in 1919, 92
University, 73 in Paterson, New Jersey, 98
Socialist Workers Party, 172 Pullman, 64
Socialists and SDS, 183
and AFL, 46-47 Students and Communist Party, 127
and gradualism VS. extremism, 54,56 Students for a Democratic Society
and Moscow trials, 131 (sos), 169, 171
in Old Left, 121 and Black Panther Party, 174, 176
and social fascism theory, 128 factionalism in, 183
and use of violence, 57-60 Suffrage rights, conservative attitudes
208 see also Socialist party toward, 8
Supreme Court, desegregation decision and Moscow trials, 131-32
of, 168-69 and rise of Hitler, 114-15
Syndicalists, 59-60 in Spain, 130
expulsion from Socialist Party, 63 and Y S A , 172
True Believer, The (Hotter), 141
Tammany Hall, 79 Twain, Mark, 37, 102
Tate, Allen, 10
Ten Days That Shook the World
UAW. See United Auto Workers
(Reed), 89, 99, 100
Theology and critiques of Maridsrn, Unions. See Trade unions
United Auto Workers (UAW), 171
142-48
United Front, 94
Theory of the Leisure Class, The
(Veblen), 48 Upward mobility, political effect of,
44-45
Third International See Comintern
USSR. See Soviet Union
"Third period" of international Utopian socialists, 23
communist movement, 123-28
and industrialization, 4
Thomas, Norman, 121, 128
of late 1900's, 52-54
Thoreau, Henry David, 10, 12, 75, 118
pre-Civil War, 49-52
To the Finland Station (Wilson), 149
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5, 137-38, 147
Towards the Understanding of Karl Varney, Harold, 89
Marx: A Revolutionary Inter- Veblen, Thorstein, 24, 25, 44, 47, 48,
pretation (Hook), 148 85
Townsend, Francis, 122 Venture (Eastman), 68
Trade union consciousness, 49 Vietnam war, impact on New Left of,
Trade unions 159-60
and Communist Party, 92, 123-26 See also Antiwar movement
Daniel DeLeon on, 66 Violence
Lenin on, 103 and Big Bill Haywood, 68
and Socialist Party, 56 dispute among socialists over, 57-60
and violence, 57-60, 63 and New Left, 188-84
See also American Federation of and Wobblies, 60
Labor; CIO; Industrial Voter registration drive, 158
Workers of the World; Strikes
Transcendentalists, 23, 51, 52, 76 Walling, William English, 31, 32, 33,
Traveler from Altruria, A (Howell), 52 34, 36, 79, 83, 85, 86
Trotsky, Leon, 81, 92, 95, 97, 100, 101, Waste Land, The (Eliot), 111
105, 133 Watts riot, 173
assassination of, 133 Weber, Max, 142, 186
on conditions for seizure of power, Weinstein, lames, 63
107-08 Weyl, Walter, 165
and Max Eastman, 102, 103 Wetland, Iulius, 13
and Moscow trials, 132 Whitman, Walt, 118, 144, 161, 188
on proletarian culture, 144 Why Is There No Socialism in the
Trotskyists, 122-23, 133, 140, 164 United States? (Sombartl, 140
on characterization of Soviet Union,135 "Will to Believe, The" (Barnes), 35 209
 "Will Communists Get Our Girls in SDS attitude toward, 171
College?" 127 and struggle for socialism, 29
Wilson, Edmund, 110, 133, 149 struggles of, 57-60
Wilson, Woodrow, 63, 83, 85 Trotskyist position on, 172
Wobblies. See Industrial Workers and utopian socialists, 53
of the World See also Strikes; Trade unions
Wolfe, Bertram D., 122 Works Progress Administration (WPA),
Workers Age, 123 127
Working class WPA. See Works Progress Adminis-
and AFL, 45-49 tration
and American socialism, 68-69
conservatism of, 44-45
YCL. See Young Communist League
and Democratic Party, 63
Yeats, John Butler, 73
during Depression, 108
Yippies, 176, 188
and fascism, 141-42
Young Communist League (YCL}, 127
and Gomperism, 66
and Popular Front, 129
Herbert Marcuse on, 192, 194
Karl Marx on, 39-40 Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), 172-73
YSA. See Young Socialist Alliance
Left as ally of, 20-23, 25
and New Left, 176
and populists, 41-42 Zinoviev, Gr1 ori, 99

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c 5
D 6
E 1
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G 9
H 0
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