The Long March of the New York Intellectuals
The early 20th Century was a time of transition for immigrant communities in the United States. In the aftermath of World War I, a new generation was able to access educational opportunities that had not been available to most of their parent’s generation. This allowed for the development of a layer of new intellectuals who were children of immigrants, or who had themselves arrived in the United States at a young age. These intellectuals were upwardly mobile, but, at the same time, suffered from reckoning with their ethnic heritage — often Jewish — and the contradictory pressures of anti-immigrant and anti-semitic attitudes among Americans existing alongside currents towards assimilation into broader society. (1)
These American intellectuals tended to be broadly critical towards U.S. society, and, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, would become radicalized even further in the direction of embracing communism. One section of this intelligentsia ultimately would reject what they saw as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s betrayal of the legacy of the October revolution, and bad policies in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), in favor of anti-Stalinist strains of Marxism. (2)
Perhaps the most famous grouping of these figures was the “New York Intellectuals,” a name which refers to a range of figures mostly associated with the the City College of New York City (CCNY, the “poor man’s Harvard,” along with a few slightly older figures who merged into this milieu, primarily Harvard University graduates previously associated with the Menorah Journal(3), a Jewish cultural magazine that had moved rapidly to the left after the stock market crash in October 1929. Some of these figures remained on the left their entire lives, while others later would spread across the political spectrum. Almost all of them would become towering figures in the American intellectual zeitgeist of the 20th century.
Political journals like Commentary, Partisan Review and Dissent made a name for themselves as the premier forums for American intellectual debates. Even National Review would feel the impact of the New York Intellectuals in the person of James Burnham, its senior editor and a former Trotskyist. Through figures like Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol, the Intellectuals would come to influence both Cold War liberalism, and the neoconservative movement. Even decades after his break with any kind of socialism, Kristol credited the debates of the CCNY days with nurturing the intellectual spirit of its participants:
If I left City College with a better education than did many students at other and supposedly better colleges, it was because my involvement in radical politics put me in touch with people and ideas that prompted me to read and think and argue with a furious energy. This was not a typical experience — I am talking about a relatively small group of students, a particular kind of student radical. Going to City College meant, for me, being a member of this group. It was a privileged experience, and I know of no one who participated in it who does not look back upon it with some such sentiment. (4)
The Intellectuals had a number of contesting positions on the Bolshevik October Revolution and the Soviet Union that emerged under Stalin. Most had viewed the latter as severely deformed, but still progressive over capitalism. With the signing of the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, many began to second guess this assessment, a debate which played out most prominently in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the organization of the American Trotskyists. Despite many of them not being members, most of the Intellectuals had accepted Trotsky’s definition of the Soviet Union as a “deformed workers’ state” in which its most privileged layers had pushed the majority of the working class out of power in the state and party bureaucracy, but which was still an advance over capitalism due to the existence of nationalized property.
In the Trotskyist schema, what was necessary was a second revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy, and to restore “Soviet democracy.” This would not be a social revolution as in October 1917, but one that would preserve the economic base of the Soviet Union, while putting the working class back in control of the state. The Trotskyists stood for “unconditional defense” of the Soviet Union, while criticizing what they saw as the counterrevolutionary and despotic policies of Stalin and the party and state bureaucracy. (5)
With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the subsequent Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland, a minority faction developed in the SWP around Max Schachtman and Martin Abern. For these members, the pact meant that the Soviet Union now had joined the imperialist camp” of the fascists, and they could not support it. Against this imperialist camp and that of the Allies, the minority postulated a “Third Camp” of the “international working class.” (6) Burnham and later Schachtman would claim that the Soviet Union had become a new form of class society that they called “Bureaucratic Collectivism,” while others in the minority believed it was “State Capitalist.” Burnham, during the faction fight, would announce his abandonment of Marxism and would become a conservative anti-communist. (7)
The SWP would expel Schachtman and his remaining followers from the party and they then would launch their own “Third Camp” organization — the “Workers Party.” While initially upholding this form of unorthodox Marxism, Schachtman’s organization would march steadily to the right throughout the subsequent decades, arguing that Soviet communism not only was not worthy of support, but had become a greater evil than American imperialism. Towards the end of his life, Schachtman would break openly with Marxism, becoming a right-wing Social Democrat who influenced much of the anti-Communist left.
While most of the Intellectuals were not party members at the time of the split, many of the intellectuals would find themselves in agreement with the minority. As a result, they would adopt a position that viewed the Soviet Union as unworthy of support at best, and at worst a greater evil than the capitalist powers. For some, this path would lead to the “right-wing socialism” of the Socialist Party of America and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, while for others it would lead to the wholesale abandonment of the socialist movement for Cold War liberalism (Sidney Hook), or neo-conservatism (Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer).
Some commentators often misunderstood this political odyssey, judging the rightward shift of the Intellectuals as not entirely genuine. Paleoconservative commentators often have insisted that neoconservativism in particular was a quasi-Trotskyist movement that had smuggled Trotsky’s idea of “Permanent Revolution” into the conservative movement. In his paper “Neoconservatives and ‘Trotskyism’,” William King argues that this idea, despite its spread beyond its original origins, is a conspiracy theory born from antisemitism on the part of many Paleoconservatives, who did not trust the new Jewish intellectual interlopers in the conservative movement. According to King, those New York Intellectuals who gave rise to the neoconservative movement not only were never Trotskyists, but many of them had also viewed Trotskyism as an ideological enemy (8):
Very few (four) of the original neoconservatives were ever Trotskyists. The small minority of neocons that were involved with the movement passed briefly and marginally through it during their late adolescence. No substantive influence from that period remains, other than an opposition to Marxism and Trotskyism, and indeed Socialism of any sort. [. . .] The accusation that neoconservatives adhere to and are implementing Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is based on either a major misreading or outright ignorance of Trotsky’s theory [ . . .] it has nothing whatsoever to do with exporting revolution. Much less does it extol upheaval for its own sake or the inherent virtues of violence and destruction — something more akin to a blend of Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon than to Trotskyism. As defined in its final form by Trotsky in the late 1920s, the theory of permanent revolution held that in third world countries, attempts to carry out the tasks of the “bourgeois-democratic” revolution, such as land reform and “authentic” national independence, would fail unless those attempts led to the seizure of power by the working class through a socialist revolution. Rather than a theory of “exporting revolution”, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is above all a theory of the possibility of socialist revolution in the third world through combining and passing over the “historical stage” of a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution.
Of the four neoconservatives who had any substantive engagement with the Trotskyist movement, almost none of them actually were dedicated Trotskyists.
Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Irving Kristol, who observers widely considered one of the most important figures of neoconservatism. A first-generation Jewish American who was born and raised in Brooklyn, Kristol would enroll at CCNY. As a history student in the 1930s, he was associated with the New York Intellectuals, and subsequently would write for Commentary during the late 1940s and early 1950s, leaving after controversially praising Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade. President George W. Bush would award him a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In his memoirs, Kristol would speak often about his Trotskyist past, but according to King, much of this is an exaggeration. Kristol was never a Trotskyist, having joined a sub-faction of the Schachtmanites known as the “Shermanites.” The Shermanites, under the leadership of future Sociologist Philip Selznick (under the pseudonym “Sherman”), rejected not only Trotskyism, but all forms of communism. According to Alan M. Wald,
Kristol joined the “Shermanites” in their departure from the Workers Party to enter the Socialist Party. The Shermanites made the change because they contended that Bolshevism was antirevolutionary, bureaucratic, totalitarian, and undemocratic. (9)
In a 1993 interview, former Shermanite leader Milton Zatinsky indicated that key issues in the founding of the faction had been abhorrence in response to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Soviet invasion of Finland. (10)
Sidney Hook, the child of Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary, (11) is a name that needs no introduction to those with even a passing knowledge of the 20th Century intellectual landscape of the United States. Famously a student of John Dewey and later a prominent advocate of Pragmatist philosophy in his own right, Hook would break from his early support for the Communist Party over the policy of “Social Fascism,” the idea The Comintern promoted that reformist Socialists were a type of fascist, and deserved treatment as such.(12) Hook believed that this policy had prevented the Communists from joining with the Socialists to stop the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, and like many of his contemporaries looked to the dissident Communist movement for an alternative. He found this movement in the American Workers Party (AWP), called “Musteite” for its founder, the radical minister A. J. Muste.
In 1934 the Musteites would fuse with the American Trotskyist movement, something which Hook was allegedly ambivalent about. Indeed, he would not take the same role in the Trotskyist leadership as his former AWP colleague James Burnham. In 1939, Hook would leave the party to organize a series of anti-communist political groupings. In the following decades, he would combine his academic career with activism against the Communist left, and for a reformist type of socialism. The Central Intelligence agency backed his “Congress of Cultural Freedom” something which alienated even some of his allies in the anti-Communist Left.
Despite his virulent anti-communism in his latter days, Hook like Kristol recognized his time among the New York Intellectuals as pivotal to his intellectual development:
We knew about the Gulag before [Alexander] Solzhenitsyn and wrote about the New Class before [Milovan] Djilas. If the statesmen of the free world had been familiar with the substance of these “petty quarrels,” the map of post-World War II might have been different. I have spent my life in universities, but (except in a few rare circles) I have never found the intellectual excitement, the total engagement in issues, and the resolute attention to detail that characterized the debates of these uncouth, undisciplined, New York Intellectuals. (13)
On the opposite end of American Communist politics were the “Lovestoneites” of the Communist Party (Opposition), who sympathized with the views of right-wing Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, and criticized the “ultra-left” line of the official Communists, and the Trotskyists. The Lovestone group, under the leadership of CCNY alumnus Jay Lovestone, held to many of the same criticisms of Stalinism as the Trotskyists, but in contrast to the orthodox Bolshevism of the Trotskyists, put forward the idea that the United States required its own special path towards socialism, owing to the strength of its capitalist system and its long-standing democratic institutions.
Despite their American exceptionalism, the Lovestoneites continued to defend the legacy of the pre-Stalin Soviet Union, but would change their political line abruptly in the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact:
The Stalin-Nazi Pact was the final blow necessary to bring the Lovestoneites to repudiate completely the Communist International. . . . By mid-1940 the Lovestoneites had come to revise almost completely their view of the Bolshevik Revolution. They published in Workers Age, with an introduction by Bertram Wolfe, Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet The Russian Revolution, a severe early criticism of the Bolshevik regime. In Wolfe’s introduction, he noted that “her warning sounds like the words of a gifted prophecy.” (14)
Despite the Luxemburg pamphlet hinting that the Lovestoneites might have been trying to stake out a position as an anti-Bolshevik Marxist organization, their trajectory was progressively to the right. Jay Lovestone himself would become a CIA informant and would work with the Free Trade Committee of the American Federation of Labor to undermine Communist influence in the international labor movement. (15)
Fellow Lovestoneite leader Bertram Wolfe broke with Lovestone over the former’s support for U.S. forces in World War II. But, while breaking with Communist politics, he would continue to consider himself a member of the non-communist left, and would earn a reputation as a scholarly writer on the history of the Communist movement. In the 1950s, Wolfe would become a leading figure in the International Broadcasting Office of the U.S. State Department, overseeing propaganda efforts to fight Communist influence in the political upheavals following World War II. (16)
Their political trajectories were many, and they took positions both in youth and age from a modern perspective one might view as highly questionable, but the story of the New York Intellectuals is a macrocosm of the transformation of the last big wave of European immigrants into “Americans.”
Both their youthful radicalism, and the compromises and about-faces they made in their later years, tell us much about the social transformation of the 20th Century United States, a process in which they were both products, and active participants.
The truth is, however, that the very possibility of human history, and the range within which human history can be made, will always be conditioned by natural necessities in whose existence man can have but a minor part. Man’s freedom will lie in the conscious choice of one of the many possible careers set for him. That choice will be a unique and irreducible expression of his own nature. (17)
Endnotes
1. Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), xv.
2. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
3. Ibid., p. 30.
4. Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 5.
5. Leon Trotsky, Joseph Hansen, and William F. Warde, In Defense of Marxism against the Petty-Bourgeois Opposition: Letters and Articles Written in 1939–40 (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942), 29.
6. Ibid., p. 167.
7. Ibid., p. 207.
8. William King, “Neoconservatives and ‘Trotskyism,’” American Communist History 3, no. 2 (2004): 265.
9. Wald, The New York Intellectuals, p. 350.
10. Morris Wiesz, Milton Zatinsky, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (March 10, 1993): 24.
11. Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 17
12. Ibid., pp. 187–188.
13. Ibid., pp. 4–5.
14. Robert J. Alexander, The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930’s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 127.
15. Ibid., p. 133.
16. Ibid., p. 134.
17. Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1933), 160.
Selected Bibliography
Alexander, Robert J. The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Hook, Sidney. Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
________. Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1933.
King, William. “Neoconservatives and ‘Trotskyism’.” American Communist History 3, №2 (2004): 247–66.
Kristol, Irving. Reflections of a Neoconservative. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Trotsky, Leon, Joseph Hansen, and William F. Warde. In Defense of Marxism against the Petty-Bourgeois Opposition: Letters and Articles Written in 1939–40. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942.
Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Weisz, Morris. Milton Zatinsky. The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (March 10, 1993).
