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Arguing the World
The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words
By Joseph Dorman University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2001 Joseph Dorman
All right reserved. ISBN: 0226158144
Chapter Three
Alcove No. 1 was located in the City College lunchroom, a vast ground-floor space which even we, who came from slums or near-slums, judged to be an especially slummy and smelly place. It was there one ate lunch, played ping-pong (sometimes with a net, sometimes without), passed the time of day between and after classes, argued incessantly, and generally devoted oneself to solving the ultimate problems of the human race. The penultimate problems we figured could be left for our declining years, after we had graduated. -- Irving Kristol, Memoirs of a Trotskyist
The basic memory was that of a sort of political sandbox. The basic memory was tussles with the other radical students.
-- Daniel Bell
In the midst of the Great Depression, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer entered the City College of New York, a gateway to the wider world for the bright, ambitious sons of the city's Jewish immigrant poor. Swelling applications during the Depression made the all-male college more competitive than ever.
Though its faculty could boast only a few distinguished names, most prominent among them the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen, its student body was perhaps equal to that of Harvard, though a good deal more radical.
By the time the four young men arrived, City College had gained notoriety for its students' left-wing politics. In 1933 an anti-ROTC demonstration provoked a confrontation between radicals and the school's starched and humorless president, Frederick Robinson. Attacking protesters with his umbrella, Robinson derided his impoverished student body as "guttersnipes."
The following year, Robinson foolishly invited a group of Italian students representing Benito Mussolini's fascist regime to speak at a campus assembly. The school's student council president -- also a member of the Young Communist League -- strode to the podium and welcomed "the tricked and enslaved students of Fascist Italy." A teacher grabbed him, pulling him from the stage, and a melee ensued. Dozens of students were suspended, and four were expelled. Demonstrations lasted for weeks afterward, attracting the notice of New York's newspapers and newsreel cameras. A twin-headed effigy of Robinson and Mussolini was burned. City College, dubbed "the little red schoolhouse" by the Hearst press, was now recognized as perhaps the most radical school in the nation. It was also one of the few colleges in New York City a smart but poor boy could afford to attend.
Irving Kristol
Class of 1940 Like most people with some political consciousness in the thirties, I assumed the world was coming to an end -- capitalism would fall apart, there would be a terrible world war that would devastate the universe, and there would be no point in preparing oneself for a profession. I knew absolutely nothing about City College. All I knew about it was that it was free. So, even though I had a very good high school record, I took it for granted always that I would go to City College, and I went.
Daniel Bell
Class of 1939 City College was always in the news, because of the radicalism of the students. Because of the very famous episode of the fascist students being greeted by the president of the college and the protests going on, the fights against ROTC. So one was constantly aware. In fact, one was much more aware of City College than of Columbia. Columbia was for the genteel. It was sort of out there. I never had a feeling of what Columbia was. Harvard was even much further out, but City College was very vivid and real.
Alfred Kazin
Class of 1935 It was an experience that was so deep, fundamental -- physically, politically -- that in some ways, it exhausted me before I could graduate. To be a poor Jewish kid at City College, to grow up in what was essentially a ghetto atmosphere was, as a matter of course, to seek an outlet, to seek some kind of transcendence.
Irving Howe Class of 1940 I went with anticipation, and fear. Anticipation that it would be very exciting, that I might even learn something, though I didn't learn terribly much -- that was my own fault -- and fear. The fear that these professors would put one down, the fear that it would be more than I could cope with or manage. You must remember I was a kid, I was sixteen years old when I went to City College. On the one hand, I had visions of great political activity. On the other hand, I was afraid of differential and integral calculus and as it turned out I had very good reason to be afraid of it.
Nathan Glazer
Class of 1944
The alternative to City in those days was NYU, and the feeling was that that was where the kids went who were dumber and had more money. Everyone lived at home and came by subway. We thought City College was a school for smart kids, because we knew you needed an eighty-eight or a ninety average in your high school courses to enter.
Tuition and board at Columbia was about six hundred dollars. You realize we're talking about '39 or '40. A hot dog with mustard was five cents and the subway was five cents, so you see that six hundred dollars was a lot of money. A twenty-dollar-a-week job was a good job. It seemed out of the question. You were aware that if you were considered left or radical, it probably wasn't a good idea. There was a whiff of anti-Semitism.
Just twenty blocks south of City College, Columbia University saw itself as a training ground for the city's Protestant elite. Faced with growing numbers of qualified Jewish applicants, many of the children of Eastern European immigrants, the school instituted an unofficial Jewish quota. One anonymous administrator explained that these children of Jewish immigrants "lacking 'social advantages'" were not "particularly pleasant companions" for Columbia's "natural constituency." The college's few Jewish students tended to be wealthy, assimilated German Jews. Accordingly, Columbia's president, Nicholas Murray Butler, had made an arrangement to steer the poorer Jews uptown to City College, whose majestic neo-Gothic buildings belied the school's essential poverty.
Irving Howe
The atmosphere was dingy -- the place needed a paint job, the teachers were overworked, many of them were mediocre. It wasn't a very distinguished faculty at all. There were a few brilliant teachers like the legendary Morris Cohen [but among the students] there was an atmosphere of perfervid, overly heated, overly excited intellectuality, because the radicalism of the moment was essentially abstract.
Irving Kristol
It was a highly political atmosphere. Other campuses had comparable groups but they weren't nearly so diverse or so large. City College, because of the kinds of kids that went there, located in the middle of the city and I would guess at least eighty-five to ninety percent Jewish and therefore with political traditions. The entire student body was to one degree or another political although most of them were passively political. But the active political types numbered in the hundreds.
A vast, gloomy, and pungent room ringed by a series of alcoves, the college cafeteria was the center of the school's restless political life. With large oak tables often used for Ping-Pong, each alcove was a world unto itself, a headquarters to one of the college's student groups. Among these were a small group of radicals who gathered daily to argue over Stalin, the Soviet Union, and the ultimate meaning of the Russian Revolution.
Irving Howe
The alcoves were little divisions in the lunchroom, sort of shaped like a horseshoe, in which students could sit and eat their lunch and there was a table on which we could put political literature.
Irving Kristol
There were probably about a dozen or so. And they were big enough to encompass a Ping-Pong table and there were benches along the wall. When you had free classes, it was the only place to go. There were no fraternity houses, there were no other opportunities that the college offered to sit down and talk to someone.
Irving Howe
I had a device of checking in at the beginning of a class when a teacher took attendance, if you could imagine, and then slipping out to go to the bathroom and coming back at the end of the hour and meanwhile spending that hour in the alcove.
Irving Kristol
It was pretty sordid, because practically everyone took along lunch. It was regarded as profligate to actually go out and buy lunch. And no one had the money anyway, so we all brown-bagged it. And we would sit there and eat lunch and talk.
Seymour Martin Lipset
Class of 1943
People would get up on these tables and make speeches, one alcove would start yelling at the other and one of the debates was about Trotsky's military leadership. One of the people who was listening was the head of the ROTC, some colonel, and it turned out he had been in Russia with the American expeditionary force and he testified to Trotsky's military prowess!
Daniel Bell
We organized our own courses. We had Writing 100 and Barricades 202 and got in these arguments. Except for a few cases, one didn't respect one's teachers. A few cases they were very bright, particularly younger ones, but by and large most of the teachers were all dodos and we educated ourselves. It became a kind of -- not Hyde Park per se, but essentially a kheder. It's a place where you constantly were disputing.
Nathan Glazer
We argued all the time. All the time. One of the chief things we had to weigh in our arguments was The New York Times. As in the expression, "Even The New York Times admits or asserts or says." The Times was the final authority.
Philip Selznick
Class of 1938
We used to use a phrase, "having a discussion." "Having a discussion" meant something rather special in those days. It meant a fairly passionate interchange, arguing about some factual matter or an interpretation or what have you and doing it at the top of your lungs! That was a discussion!
Irving Kristol Every alcove had its own identity, there was the jock alcove for the athletes. There were alcoves for the ROTC people -- I don't think I ever met one -- and then there was the Catholic alcove, the Newman Club. I don't think I ever met one of those either. We did ghettoize ourselves. There was even, I am told, a Young Republican Club, but I don't think I met anyone who belonged to that club and maybe they didn't exist. But pretty much our life in City College was concentrated between alcove one and alcove two, the anti-Stalinist left and the Stalinist left. And that was our world, at least our intellectual universe.
At City College, Kristol and Howe had found an intellectual hero in the exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky. The Trotskyists gathered in alcove one with their radical cohorts, including socialists like Daniel Bell and radical Zionists like Nathan Glazer, who would join the alcove in a few years. And there was a host of tiny splinter groups, each with its own arcane gospel of theory and usually identified by the name of its dissident leader.
Irving Kristol
I had a couple of very good friends who had come with me from Boys' High to City College, and they had been influenced by the Trotskyists, who were a tiny group compared to the Communists, a quite large group. And I wanted to be a radical. In 1936-37, what else was there to be? So I decided to go along with the Trotskyists; there couldn't have been more than twelve.
Then you had some independents, another ten or so, and then you had small so-called splinter groups like the Lovestonites, and each of them maintained their radical purity as against what they regarded as the heresies of the other groups.
Daniel Bell
You had Social Democrats or Socialists like myself. You had Lovestonite splinter groups. You had Marlinites, Ohlerites, Stamites. Names that are dimly lost in the footnote histories of the past.
Nathan Glazer
In my first year I was taken to a meeting, was deeply impressed, and it was a student Zionist group. I had no particular Zionist leanings and I came from a home that was not Zionist. But a friend dragged me off to a meeting where City College alumnus Seymour Melman was going to talk about his year in Palestine, as it was then called. I went to speak to him after the meeting and he was always engaged in finding recruits. The next thing I knew I was editor of the student newspaper Avukah Student Action! Why he saw a potential editor in me I don't know. But I was rapidly swept up in the group.
It had a double character: as the student Zionist organization for those groups from the Midwest who were primarily Zionist and then as a Marxist Zionist organization for members from the New York area. It introduced me to sophisticated leftist thought and the whole history of Zionism. It was very left, very close to the Trotskyites on campus and to the anti-Communist left. And that brought me into the anti-Communist left group.
The radicals of alcove one spent their days immersing themselves in radical theory, studying together the classic Marxist texts. In addition to Marx's own work, including his massive dissection of capitalism, Das Kapital, there was the work of his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, and of the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, among others. And then there were those works that had sprung up in the midst of the Soviet revolution: books by Lenin, by Trotsky, and by other key revolutionaries such as Nikolai Bukharin.
Philip Selznick
You were simply plunging yourself into the literature to acquaint yourself with its nuances to make sure that you now are developing the expertise to be able to read the newspapers, and to come up with an interpretation of events, what we used to call a party line, the official position. That official position had to be thought out. There had to be an argument. And the capacity to make that argument and the capacity to bring to bear relevant facts and history and so on, this was a situation much to be desired from the point of view of your own self-image, self-respect.
Nathan Glazer
Each of these groups would tend to gather to read what they felt to be the classics of their faction. But, first of all, we would read Marx, and I remember one of the first things Seymour Melman gave me, feeling I had to be educated as a Social Democrat, was Marx's Wage-Labor and Capital. It was like a forty- to sixty-page pamphlet and it was very enlightening, a good summary. In fact, I think possibly that's all one needs! And I know we read Nikolai Bukharin, his book, Historical Materialism.
Daniel Bell
We'd read Kapital. And there was always the great sense of competitiveness of being able to cite a better source than somebody else. We'd be reading Engels on street tactics. We'd say, but comrades, there are no longer any paving blocks here, as in Paris. We can't dig up the paving blocks and throw them at the troops. What do we do? Ah! Real problems! And somebody would come up, of course, with a great solution. You'd be surprised how many great military strategists came out of City College! Somebody'd come up and say, well, if you can't get paving blocks and throw them at troops, you barricade each end of the street when the police are in there, and the brave revolutionary women -- it's always the women who were given those tasks -- the brave revolutionary women go up on top of the roof and throw down hot water!
Irving Kristol
There were a lot of arguments of a highly Jesuitical nature. You would find a quotation from Trotsky or from Rosa Luxemburg and you would pose it as the text for the day and then you would argue about it. And this required knowing a lot about the Soviet Union, and we read a lot about the Soviet Union. This required knowing a lot about the history of the Communist movement and we read a lot about the history of the Communist movement -- the international, not the American Communist movement. The discussions were really quite sophisticated. Looking back on it, pointless, but nevertheless sophisticated and good intellectual exercise.
Daniel Bell
The great crushing rejoinder was in the end: Look, you know what Trotsky has to do and I know what Trotsky has to do, but does Trotsky know what he has to do?!
Argumentative, contentious, divided in their beliefs, the boys of alcove one were united solely by their opposition to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and to his much larger group of followers who had made their home next door in alcove two.
Daniel Bell
It was all a kind of defensive alliance against the Communists. That's what brings people together more often than not. And in City College this was the thing that counted.
Irving Howe
Anyone who was an anti-Stalinist on the left was a natural ally for our beleaguered group, because we were distinctly -- in the left-wing world at City College -- a quite small minority and we felt, in fact we were, beleaguered. I would say in alcove one, which was the hangout of the various anti-Stalinist left groups, there may have been a total of fifty students. In alcove two, which was the hangout for Communist students, I would guess that they had upwards of four hundred to five hundred members, which was of course a very good deal.
At a certain point, I think it was '38 or '39, the Communists decided to break off all verbal relations with their opponents in alcove one, because we were steadily chipping away, taking away a few of their people, not very many but a few and some of the better, brighter ones.
Irving Kristol
Members of the Young Communist League were forbidden to talk to us, I mean, literally forbidden by their organization to have a conversation!
Seymour Martin Lipset
As far as the Communists were concerned the Trotskyists were not only traitors, they were fascists. They had a policy that no Communists were supposed to talk to a Trotskyist or debate them. They could talk to socialists.
Irving Howe
We taunted them. We had one fellow with a foghorn voice named Sammy Portnoy, and he would stand in alcove one and hold up a socialist paper, a left-wing paper and yell, "Read about Stalin the Butcher," and they would become very aggravated and aroused and sometimes we would literally provoke them into entering a debate or discussion. Well, when that happened, we were usually better at this. They were better at many other things, they were better at taking over the student government, at organization, but we were quick on our feet intellectually, we were quick verbally, and we would taunt them into a debate and go at it.
Nathan Glazer
I recall one story of a debate, between Seymour Melman and the Communists. Melman held forth for something like six or eight hours as various people rose up against him, then had to go to class! He decided to drop his classes, I suppose. And people would come, and go to class, and come back, and he was still holding forth, he was still going hammer and tongs. He had tremendous energy. That was the old style, the style in which someone could speak for three or four hours.
The fight over Stalin had agitated radical circles for years. Stories highly critical of the regime had filtered out of the Soviet Union; there were claims of labor camps, political executions, and forced starvation. Did economic justice and political equality actually exist in the country that claimed to be the world's first "worker's state"? From his exile in Mexico, Trotsky derided Stalin as a ruthless dictator bent on destroying all political opposition.
In 1936 a series of show trials began in Moscow. Over the course of three years, many of the Soviet elite were accused of conspiring to undermine the revolution, in league with Nazi Germany. One after another, they pleaded guilty to charges of foreign espionage and were executed. Trotsky himself was sentenced to death in absentia.
American Communists and their supporters among the intelligentsia, like Walter Duranty of The New York Times and Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic, rose to defend the trials. But for the anti-Stalinist left, the Moscow trials raised alarming new questions about the world's first socialist state.
Lenin had made the Communist party a political weapon to rule Russia, and Stalin had turned that weapon into an instrument of his own personal power. Faced with Stalin's brutal regime, some began openly to wonder whether Lenin's revolution had inevitably led to Stalin.
Philip Selznick
The experience of the Moscow trials with the revolution turning upon its founders was a dramatic case, which many of us thought about a great deal, what was the larger significance of all of this, what did it mean for the basic perspective of revolutionary Socialism, of Leninism?
I think that many of the ideas that we developed were largely worked out, at some level at least, in response to those highly traumatic experiences. It wasn't just that some tyranny had been established, but that this tyranny arose out of the movement which was supposed to bring social justice to the world. That was the great contradiction with which we had to cope.
Daniel Bell
Here were all the major figures who had created the Russian Revolution being murdered by Stalin. Not only being murdered, but being forced in an abject way to confess to the most ludicrous kinds of accusations: that they were agents of the Gestapo, agents of Germany, etc. These were people, many of them who had a certain kind of aura. Zinoviev had been the head of the Communist International; Bukharin had been the editor of Pravda[the Soviet party newspaper], and he had written the main textbook called Historical Materialism. You had a situation where the entire group of revolutionary persons, almost without exception, was simply destroyed and forced in this way to bend the knee. And there just wasn't one set of trials, but a series of two or three and this went on over a period of several years. Plus of course the accusations against Trotsky that he had been the mastermind of the whole thing.
It was all captured in the old phrase: the Revolution devours its children. Here you had a situation wherein the Moscow trials in a personal, dramatic sense meant the revolution devouring its children.
There's a pamphlet of Rosa Luxemburg which a few of us knew. She said the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship of the party becomes the dictatorship of a single person. So there was a feeling all along that here was a regime which was no longer a regime of morality, a regime of hope.
Irving Howe
We were raising some of the most fundamental ethical and moral problems of politics, though we wouldn't have put it that way. We had no awareness that we were engaged in such lofty enterprises. We thought we were discussing revolutionary or Marxist strategy. At that point we thought of ourselves as anti-Stalinist Marxists, anti-Stalinist leftists. But as I see it now, we were often engaged in more fundamental, ethical questions. The whole problem of the nature of Stalinism. I put it now in abstract terms but that was really what we were talking about. The anti-Stalinist groups, which meant in those days mostly the Trotskyist youth group and the socialists and a few other left-wing groups, the main contribution they made politically, intellectually was in the fight against Stalinism and the fight against the totalitarian perversion that we saw Stalinism to mean.
Irving Kristol
One of the reasons intellectual life in alcove one was so interesting was that so much of it was internal self-examination. We were not just denouncing the bourgeois world or capitalism. In fact, we really didn't spend that much time on it. It was much more interesting trying to figure out our own radicalism, and particularly that absolutely overwhelming question that haunted us, namely, was there something in Marxism and in Leninism that led to Stalinism? To what degree was there a connection? This was the question that all along bothered us, that was a prelude to our future politics.
Irving Howe
Some of the particular theories we had about Stalinism have proven to be questionable, but in our insistence that any socialist value that was worth preserving had to be based on democracy, that socialism and democracy were indissoluble, there I think we were right.
Irving Kristol
Irving Howe oddly enough at that time was the party boss of the Trotskyists. He was the one looked to for the authoritative doctrine on whatever the issue of the day was. He was the man who applied his mind to a rigorous definition of what was right and what was wrong in radical politics. I, myself, had not joined the Young Trotskyists until shortly after I left college, but I had been a fellow traveler for about three years. If anyone recruited me, I suppose you could say it was Irving Howe. He recruited me, one might say, and he also expelled me, about a year later, for coming to the conclusion that, in fact, there was an organic connection between Leninism and Stalinism.
Irving Howe
I made a big mistake with Irving Kristol, and that was recruiting him to begin with. He wasn't, let's say, good material, but he wasn't expelled ever. He was part of a little group which developed different ideas, dissident ideas, and they left. When he called me the party boss or the chief ideologist he is perhaps transposing his own experiences in the Republican party in recent years to an earlier time. I suppose I and one or two others were the leading spokesmen, the most articulate figures around alcove one. But the organization of these groups was very loose. There was no effort at any kind of political or intellectual discipline. People spoke freely. We were Democrats, without recognizing it or acknowledging it, I believe. There was no effort to conform to a party line. If I was a party boss I don't know who I bossed around.
Seymour Martin Lipset
If you joined the Trotskyist Yipsels, you were supposed to have a party name and mine was Lewis. The party name tradition went back to Russia, the Bolsheviks hiding from the Secret Police, confusing them. So the Communists all had party names, the Trotskyists all had party names, the Socialists didn't. Peter Rossi, the only guy I ever recruited for the movement, was Italian and came from Corona in Queens. He chose the party name Rosen. Well here we had one real gentile, a real goy, and he wanted to be called Rosen! So Howe took it on himself to tell him that he should use another name, not a Jewish name.
Kristol became Ferry, his friend Earl Raab was Perry. Why? James P. Cannon, who was the leader of the Trotskyists, used to pronounce periphery, "perryferry." He'd talk about the "perryferry" of the movement. Kristol and Raab didn't join for a long time, but they were hanging around so they were on the periphery. They were the "perryferry." And when they joined they took the names Perry and Ferry!
Daniel Bell
Howe at that time was still not Howe. He originally was Hornstein, Irving Hornstein. When I first knew him, curiously enough, he was using a very different name. He used a name called Hugh Ivan. He was writing polemical articles, so he used the name Hugh Ivan as a kind of Party name. So we argued at that time and became friends.
Curiosity led us to want to explore everything, know everything, be able to talk on everything. I suppose that's the definition of a New York intellectual: a man who given two minutes' preparation can speak for fifteen minutes on any subject in the world.
Continues...
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