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The Long War
The Intellectual People's Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930â"1940
By Judy Kutulas Duke University Press
Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9848-6
CHAPTER 1
"Leftbound Local": The Lost Generation, Social Activists, Communists, and the Depression
The Depression drew a larger number of American intellectuals into politics; but most were already politicized in some sense by their experiences in the teens and twenties. It is sometimes difficult to see the continuities between the twenties and the thirties, however, because of all the myths about that "roaring" decade, many of them perpetuated by intellectuals themselves. Dozens of memoirs speak of a nonstop "merry-go-round" of wild parties, exotic locales, and obscure cultural movements. Like many myths, this one had some truth to it, but perhaps more apt was Malcolm Cowley's word, "exiles," or Gertrude Stein's appellation, "the lost generation," to describe young middleclass intellectuals who came of age during World War I, for they spent their youth feeling alienated from authority and power, whether or not they actually were. As they later told their story, however, it was hedonism that moved them in the 1920s, not anxiety. And, when their country was in trouble, the story continued, they realized the error of their ways and "went left" in a "spontaneous and generous spirit" to help save it. But the Depression did not mark the end of one clear-cut period of their lives and the beginning of another. Their post-1929 radicalization was tentative and incomplete and their 1920s experiences were never as effete as they imagined.
The typical 1920s intellectual had already traveled a great distance from his or her beginnings long before the decade began. Most main-stream intellectuals back then came from genteel, conservative, small town, middle-class, Protestant families. But because they were born at a time of rapid change, both material and philosophical, there was a great gap between them and their parents. The very circumstances of their lives were technologically different thanks to telephones, automobiles, bathtubs, and gas furnaces. More importantly, their consciousnesses were shaped by a much less certain world than the one their parents knew. Darwinism challenged older notions about religion and hierarchy. Marxism provided a new political and economic perspective. The new disciplines of the social sciences sensitized educated people to cultural diversity and difference. The society they faced–industrialized, urban, and filled with immigrants–was more complex. The values handed down from their parents seemed badly outmoded to the precocious younger generation.
The full impact of the changes did not hit until these young people reached college. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz argued that before World War I a rebel culture emerged at many universities. Its advocates rejected their families and the traditional college culture of sports and organized activities in favor of a more intellectually engaging model. Young people banded together to talk about suffrage, socialism, and social problems, to work in settlement houses, and to read and discuss literature. Such rebels found it hard to fit back into the parents' worlds. College was, Malcolm Cowley believed, the first step in "a long process of deracination ... making us homeless citizens of the world." Once out of their small midwestern or New England towns, few returned. They left, Henry F. May noted, "in a mood of excitement and hope, not necessarily in a spirit of rejection." Indeed, it was easy to forget one's past when faced with intoxicating future possibilities.
As members of this intellectual generation stepped into the wider world, the social issues of the Progressive Era engaged many of them. The Reverend John Haynes Holmes became an urban progressive, a settlement house worker, and a pacifist. Roger Baldwin also worked in a settlement house, as did his one-time fiancee, Anna Louise Strong. Freda Kirchwey joined the picket line during the New York City shirtwaist strike while still at Barnard and supported Margaret Sanger's crusade for birth control. Feminism particularly influenced female intellectuals of this generation. Inez Haynes Irwin, Sara Bard Field (who left her children behind with a maid while she campaigned for the vote in Oregon), Suzanne LaFollette, Agnes Smedley, Genevieve Taggard, and Kirchwey all campaigned for women's rights. Several male intellectuals were also ardent feminists, especially Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, whose sister, Crystal, was one of the country's better-known feminists. Progressivism and feminism introduced young people to a wider and more diverse America and taught them to question orthodoxy and build networks. Both gave intellectuals a head start on the 1930s.
World War I was an important milestone in the maturation of young intellectuals. Some rushed off to fight, pumped full of Wilsonian idealism, and returned disillusioned. Others opposed the war and suffered because of it. War ended the period of domestic reform and fostered a new atmosphere, one intolerant of dissent. A handful of intellectuals were directly affected by wartime laws. The editors of The Masses went on trial for violating the Espionage Act of 1917. War's lesson was a bitter one for optimistic young people nurtured by progressive rhetoric and values: reform was only a temporary expedient pulled away by the powerful at whim. "Progress" was a complicated matter.
After the war, many young intellectuals felt let down by their society. Some retrenched in smaller enclaves like Greenwich Village, Paris, and the South of France to escape what they perceived as the soulless existence of postwar America. They were "lost" in a world that seemed senseless, exiling themselves before the larger society exiled them. In his famous essay for Civilization in the United States, "The Literary Life," Van Wyck Brooks complained that there was no support for creative expression because Americans valued only what was "practical." Whatever spirit talented writers had quickly evaporated in such an atmosphere because "one must feel ... that what one is doing matters." By withdrawing, the so-called bohemians could maintain their critical élan; flouting cultural and social conventions became a way of expressing their dissatisfaction with American capitalism. "Society could never be changed by any effort of the will," Cowley remembered, so there was no sense tilting at windmills.
It would be a mistake to see this retreat as stagnation, however. Intellectuals grew creatively during the 1920s. They tried out different forms and new ideas. They interacted with their European counterparts. Some wrote novels of social protest. Others experimented with dada, cubism, or expressionism, currents strong in Europe. Still others produced histories, literary criticism, plays, or poetry. They also grew as human beings, got married, had children, settled down. The process was not always an easy one. A number of intellectuals struggled with depression, alcoholism, or sexual problems. By the end of the decade, even they perceived their situation more ambiguously. The salons of Greenwich Village exerted less pull on them, and farms in upstate New York more. They were perhaps not as fully alienated from the world as they imagined.
Many, moreover, were not alienated at all. Some were merely unhappy with society as it existed and ready to change it. What distinguished them from the lost generation was their age (they were slightly older) and their social activism. Prewar social activists–ministers, social scientists, lawyers, and editors–generally stuck with their commitments after the war. They had a confidence that fiction writers and critics often lacked. Activism kept them fresh and made them optimistic. They were better grounded politically. Many successfully replaced the verities of the Victorian era with their own secular trinity: science, pragmatism, and rationality. Others embraced socialism. Still further to the left, the new Communist Party offered an agenda modeled on the Russian Revolution. What set these intellectuals apart from their less optimistic colleagues was not so much the specific politics they adopted as their willingness to risk direct political commitment at all. They demonstrated by their actions that they had a faith in the possibility of change.
Consciously or unconsciously, a fair percentage of those who were politically active intellectuals in the 1920s derived their ideas from a few critical thinkers. Charles Beard, Franz Boas, and Morris Raphael Cohen each had their advocates. But it was John Dewey who became "a leader among those eager to take part in social reorganization," as Robert Westbrook has noted. Dewey had great faith in "American democracy," but not as it existed in the 1920s. He envisioned a community constructed to "liberat[e] ... individuals" from the tyranny of tradition, competition, waste, and selfishness. Liberating people, he argued, released "the greatest amount of human energy," the building block of social change. Maximizing human potential inevitably led to social progress. Individual wants and social good converged for Dewey at a point rationality and experimentation defined. Social engineering would improve the quality of Americans' lives. These reforms would rid America of the prudishness and superstition of the past while making the economy more efficient, the political process more accessible, and society more equitable.
Science and experts were key to the process Dewey described. His ideal society trucked no compromise with tradition or superstition. It functioned according to observable laws. Social experts, people like himself, could help define and correct social ills. His was a reform agenda, even though the business climate was hostile to reform. Throughout the 1920s, social activists tied themselves to institutional bases like the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the International Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, and the National Women's Party. Although they measured their progress in small increments, their willingness to form, fund, and maintain agencies for change suggests they never succumbed to the lost generation's sense of impotence.
Not all social activists were so optimistic, however. Dewey's enthusiasm seemed misplaced to at least one other intellectual in the 1920s, Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr scoffed at Dewey's belief in "man's essential goodness ... [and] faith in human history." The sum of individual goals was not the larger social good. Thinking so was a "liberal illusion." Individual interests inevitably clashed, he insisted. Greed and conflict were just as likely outcomes as social harmony. Liberalism had no safeguards against such eventualities. Niebuhr's views differed considerably from Dewey's, but their remedies were similar. Niebuhr belonged to the Socialist Party, putting him politically to the left of Dewey, yet both favored government-mandated economic equity. And, like other left-leaning intellectuals in the 1920s, both were opposed to the business-oriented economic structure of American society.
Whether they were as hopeful as Dewey or as gloomy as the lost generation, 1920s intellectuals had an impact on one another and the larger society. Despite their sense that they were unacknowledged and frivolous, writers discovered that critical creativity paid well and was popular. Americans liked to read about the foibles of the middle class and a culture without values. The alternative lifestyles of Greenwich Village rebels entertained them. A few members of the lost generation became nationally recognized celebrities. It was a bit difficult to maintain a sense of alienation when foundations offered you money and magazines bought what you wrote. New ideas trickled through educated society. Social critics disputed long-standing notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority, African American inferiority, social Darwinism, and manifest destiny. College professors, The New Republic's editors, and Greenwich Village poets embraced sexual liberation, pro-union sentiment, pacifism, and vague socialism. The 1920s experience was not as bleak as members of the lost generation later painted it, though their dissatisfaction with the larger culture helped to unite them as a community.
There were, however, intellectuals who were more consistently marginalized by 1920s society. They were doubly invisible, distinguished both by their atraditional backgrounds and their political radicalism. Most radical intellectuals of the 1920s were neither middle class nor Protestant. They did not attend Yale or Princeton or have the money to spend a year or two in Paris. They could not travel in the same circles as most intellectuals, even bohemians. They lacked the connections, money, credentials, and experiences that would facilitate their admission into mainstream intellectual circles. Their association with the American Communist Party reinforced their distance from orthodox American society and the orthodox intellectual community. Before World War I, socialist intellectuals like Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, and Bertram Wolfe found the boundaries between bohemia and radicalism far more flexible than after. In the 1920s, circumstances pushed them into a small, self-contained radical world.
That world was very different from either the bohemia of the lost generation or the established institutions of social activism. In fact, the places radicals called home were often the targets of social activists' efforts. Radical intellectuals were ethnic, poor, and urban as a group. A substantial percentage were immigrants or the children of immigrants, particularly Eastern European Jews who relocated to New York City. Many were exposed early to radical politics, on the street, from their parents, in the pages of Freiheit. Like Michael Gold, they "blundered into" the socialist movement and it moved them, but it also provided them with an avenue for their ambitions. Very few sons or daughters of working-class Jews became college professors, particularly in the age of quotas. But many such people led unions, organized protests, or wrote for The Masses. Radical intellectuals found that the radical subculture of the prewar years was conducive to literary and artistic expressions of politics. The Masses published many such political cartoons, stories, poems, and plays. After the war and the Bolshevik Revolution, however, such an easy overlapping of politics and art became less tenable. Governmental harassment made radical politics a riskier occupation. The revolution in Russia reordered radical priorities in the United States. The SPUSA split three ways, creating two new organizations pledged to the Bolshevik model of revolution in addition to the more evolutionary Socialists. Most of the more traditional left-wing intellectual community stayed with the Socialists. The less traditional intellectuals, people like Gold, Louis Fraina, and Jay Lovestone, went with one or the other communist organizations. In the Communist Party or the Communist Labor Party (later fused into the modern CPUSA) their first responsibility was to nurture the movement; only in their spare time could they pursue their more private careers.
The Party's overriding need for committed and active members created tensions between its functionaries and radical intellectuals. The CPUSA valued volunteers more as members of the working class than as writers, artists, and thinkers. An anti-intellectual radical tradition already existed; the new party's small stature and desperate status exacerbated it. Gold recalled that in the old Industrial Workers of the World, "the word 'intellectual' became a synonym for the word 'bastard.'" "In the American Communist movement," he concluded, "there is some of this feeling as well." Gold certainly reinforced that bias with his "proletarian props" and "peppery" style. Party functionaries encouraged the belief that intellectual ambitions were invariably individual and, therefore, selfish, decadent, and elitist. "Lenin never drew cartoons," declared Robert Minor as he temporarily shelved his artistic career to become a Party activist. He might aspire to a leadership role, but those not willing to devote themselves wholly to the CPUSA were expected to serve it "in the ranks" as Joseph Freeman noted. Consigned to the bottom of the radical status hierarchy because the working class came first, intellectuals were expected to be "damned humble and damned disciplined." Accepting these tensions was far easier in the abstract than on a day-to-day basis.
From John Reed on, a few CPUSA intellectuals questioned their status within the movement. Some found it hard to reconcile their concepts of what intellectuals did with the centralized structure of the CPUSA, which made top functionaries the keepers of Marxist orthodoxy. Some left the movement during the 1920s, including the American version of the "Left Opposition," James P. Cannon and other supporters of Leon Trotsky, and the "Right Opposition" or American exceptionalists, Lovestone, Wolfe, and Will Herberg. Radical intellectuals broke with the American Communist Party for both philosophical and personal reasons. In either case, it was the Party's unwillingness to tolerate dissent and heterodoxy that prompted their departures.
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Excerpted from The Long War by Judy Kutulas. Copyright © 1995 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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