Michael Wreszin (1926-2012)

I'm not going to be posting much today, but I did want to note the passing of the historian and biographer Michael Wreszin at the age of 85.  Although Wreszin died on August 12, his family announced his death this past weekend, which is when the New York Times published its obituary of him.

Wreszin, who was a professor of history at Queens College, is best known for three biographies of iconoclastic American leftists:  Oswald Garrison Villard: Pacifist at War (1965), The Superfluous Anarchist: Albert Jay Nock (1972), and A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: the Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (1992).

Although I consume a lot of biographies (and parts of many more), biography is not a genre that I'm naturally drawn to, either in my own work or in my reading for pleasure.  So I am perhaps not the best person to hold forth on what makes for a good biography. Nonetheless, Wreszin's biography of Macdonald remains one of my favorite biographies of an American intellectual.  I approached the book having read a fair bit of Macdonald's writings from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, but knowing only the broadest outlines of his life.  Wreszin brought Macdonald to life in a way that illuminated  both the man and his work, as well as the broader worlds that he inhabited as, at various times, a Troskyist, a democratic socialist, a pacifist, an editor at Fortune, The Partisan Review, and politics, a New York intellectual, a film critic, and an activist.  Having read Rebel in Defense of Tradition, I felt that I had really understood this peculiar and important thinker.   And I can't ask for more from a biography.  I should add that it is also a very good read.

I never had the opportunity to meet Wreszin or even to hear him talk.  Consider this an open thread for discussion of Michael Wreszin and his work.

Irony, Engagement, and The New Yorker

Guest post by Campbell F. Scribner

University of Wisconsin

Close on the heels of the Livingston/Murphy exchange, Andrew Hartman has called for a defense of irony in history, humor, and politics.  I cannot provide a comprehensive accounting but thought I might push the conversation a bit further back than his references to 1950s liberalism.

The charge of “detachment” now leveled at humorists like Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert is merely a reprise of left-wing attacks on E.B. White and James Thurber—the “heart and soul” of the New Yorker magazine—during the 1930s.  At that time the New Yorker was a sophisticated, satirical weekly that refused to publish serious political commentary.  Yet in 1946 it would release an issue comprised of a single article, John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” which has been recognized as one of the century’s definitive pieces of investigative journalism.  The intervening decade obviously brought a significant shift in editorial policy, which several historians describe as “a correction to the New Yorker’s much criticized silence on suffering during the Depression.”[i]  If that were the case, it would seem that the opponents of irony had won a round.

But the shift was not so simple.  The two writers that received the brunt of radicals’ criticism reacted in quite different ways.  While White brooded (and eventually broke) over accusations of irony and escapism, Thurber aggressively combated them, going out of his way to confront the magazine’s critics.  Their responses, and the New Yorker’s gradual politicization, provide a case study on the ethics of irony.

White had joined The New Yorker in 1926, a year after its founding.  He was an introspective hypochondriac who quickly assumed responsibility for the magazine’s editorial page, “commenting on the week’s events in a manner none too serious.”  Thurber was hired two years later as a writer and cartoonist, and the two men shared an office throughout the 1930s.  Thurber was slight of build, partially blind, and neurotically self-conscious, as prone to doodles and daydreaming as his famous protagonist, Walter Mitty. Yet, unlike White, he compensated for his insecurities with a brash nonchalance and pugnacious drinking habits.

The New Yorker’s earliest critics were Michael Gold and Joseph Freeman, contributors at the Stalinist magazine, The New Masses.  Met with suspicion in their own circles—the Communist Party generally regarded literature as bourgeois decadence—they took up the task of flattering or browbeating authors outside the Party into politically engaged writing. For Gold and Freeman the class struggle was literally a war of words, and the enemy was not only the capitalist plutocrat but the uncommitted writer, the one “who distrusted all convictions and ideals, whose chief foe was dullness, who insulated himself from the currents of life, who despised yokels and morons but was much farther from reality than they.” In short, the writer who worked for the New Yorker.[ii]

Critics also appeared at the Trotskyist Partisan Review, whose inaugural (1937) issue featured Dwight Macdonald expounding on the economic underpinnings of New Yorker humor.  Macdonald noted that since the stock market crash, “The brash Menckenians and the aggressively sophisticated Algonquins [of the 1920s] have been superceded by the timorous and bewildered Thurber,” whose beset, day-dreaming characters became a stand-in for the economically impotent bourgeoisie, “an expression of a deep-rooted uncertainty…which this class has come to feel in the late economic crisis.”  Macdonald likewise argued that the New Yorker’s dependence on luxury advertising required it to maintain an aloof, escapist tone. While the magazine remained “ostentatiously neutral” and “[refused], officially, to recognize the existence of wars, strikes, and revolution, just as it doesn’t mention the more unpleasant diseases,” he contended that its irony was nonetheless political, a defense mechanism of the upper class.[iii]

The New Yorker did not take these accusations too much to heart.  In its pages, Communists came in for the same sort of satire as everyone else.  For example, E.B. White quipped in April 1934:

One of the duties of the radical press is…to keep the masses in a high state of dissatisfaction with the world.  Apparently this even includes keeping them displeased with the weather. On Thursday, April 5th, we picked up our Daily Worker to get into a proper inflammatory mood for literary composition and noticed with some surprise that the forecast said: ‘WEATHER: Probably rain.’  This dire prediction failed to check with the eight capitalist dailies…predicting fair and warmer. It must be fun to run a Communist organ and give even the weather a sly twist to the left.[iv]

A month later, after the largest May Day rallies ever held in New York, a two-page cartoon appeared with the mock headline, “The Rightist Opposition Forms a United Front and Takes Over Union Square for a Counter-Demonstration.” In it hundreds of top-hatted men and bejeweled women carried signs reading “Down With Proletarian Encroachment,” “Let ’Em Eat Cake,” and “Make the World Safe for Plutocracy,” and marched in a parade of tuxedoes and foxhounds.[v]

James Thurber responded to calls for politically engaged writing with a 1936 article entitled “Notes for a Proletarian Novel,” in which he sarcastically traced literature’s progression from sentimental romance to melancholy searches for Something Worthwhile to his contemporary atmosphere, in which one was compelled to write about the workingman in drab terms, to the exclusion of love and individuality. Despite his own attachment to those “bourgeois affects,” Thurber acknowledged the need for some political consciousness.  He even admitted serving on an advocacy committee during a local waiters’ strike, but wryly stated that he could never write a novel about it because he had no idea what waiters did when they went home, and an author could not omit the home life of his characters.[vi]

Moreover, for all of their zeal, Thurber doubted whether his leftist opponents had any idea what waiters did when they went home, either.  Most, he believed, had signed on to proletarian literature as a fad and had little personal connection with the working class.  White similarly lamented the plight of the “politically anemic…[who] go to work in the morning, work hard to make a profit, and return in the evening to serve a gentle round of sherry to a roomful of leftists who insist that no more profits be made and ask for more sherry.”[vii] Many of those sherry-sippers nonetheless hoped to turn the New Yorker “into a voice of protest and rebellion” and set about trying to convert its lead writers.  Thurber was repeatedly cornered at parties and forced to defend the New Yorker’s editorial stance.  Shouting usually ensued.  He threw drinks at Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett and got into fistfights with Michael Gold and Hart Crane.

But Thurber’s responses were not limited to jabs, written or thrown: in 1936 he seriously reviewed Granville Hicks’ collection, Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935), for Malcolm Cowley and the New Republic.  In it, he dismissed Joseph Freeman, who wrote Hicks’ introduction, as juvenile and petty, and complained that most of the genre’s political critiques “[degenerated] into what [had] the thin ring of an absurd personal insult.”  Although art could be political, he maintained that politics alone do not constitute art. Armed with embarrassingly inept excerpts, he presented the writing in Proletarian Literature as pedantic, the dialogue unconvincing, and the supposedly proletarian characters utterly lacking in ethos.  More than simply its partisan material, a lack of style discredited the volume as propaganda.[viii]

Despite Thurber’s efforts at levity, the New Yorker’s copy took a grimmer turn as the Depression wore on.  Younger writers joined the staff, and submissions increasingly reflected the somber language and outlook of the era.  In 1937, White lamented that “nobody writes funny pieces anymore; all [are] written by 23 year old Jews, about life.”[ix]  White himself remained unsure of the magazine’s apolitical stance.  He later recalled feeling that “everyone else was foundering [while] we were running free” and that he “escaped the hard times undeservedly.”[x]  In 1934, Ralph Ingersoll, a Communist fellow-traveler and the editor of Fortune magazine, blamed White’s “gossamer writing” for the New Yorker’s “nebulous” tone, flatly accusing White of evading issues of unemployment and poverty.  Ingersoll pressed the issue in 1937, when White tentatively opposed Roosevelt’s “court packing” plan.  In a personal letter, Ingersoll fumed:  “I am no one to defend Roosevelt whole—too many things about him enrage me. But, so does your gentle complacency….Doesn’t that well-fed stomach of yours ever turn when you think what you’re saying?”[xi]

It was a pinprick from a personal friend, and White could think of only one response: he quit, moving to rural Maine to write and tend a small farm.

Thurber desperately tried to get him to return to New York.  “Never has there been so much to laugh at off and on,” he argued:

Those of us who are able to do that must keep on doing it, no matter who or what goes to hell, if only because Joe Freeman and his gang says we should not. It is the easiest thing in the world nowadays to become so socially conscious, so Spanish war stricken, that all sense of balance and values goes out of a person.” 

For Thurber, left-wing intellectuals were not only self-righteous but, by sacrificing the responsibility of independent creativity for the “grimly gray” Party line, their accusations of escapism rang with hypocrisy.  After all, what could be more escapist than forfeiting one’s point of view in favor of mandatory politicization, capitulating to artistic peer pressure?  The New Yorker may not have been “designed to stem tides, join crusades, or take political stands,” but Thurber found its skepticism as much “a point of moral necessity” as the Communist demand for engaged writing.[xii]

Only at the end of World War II (which the New Yorker covered in depth) did White go back to writing editorials.  For the twentieth-anniversary issue, he reflected: “We [first] armed ourself with a feather for tickling a few chins, and now…we find ourself gingerly holding a glass tube for transfusing blood….We feel like a man who left his house to go to a Punch-and-Judy show and, by some error in direction, wandered into ‘Hamlet.’” By that time the magazine had become a solidly liberal voice, and White used his space to oppose nuclear escalation and support the United Nations.[xiii]

Criticism from the Left persisted, of course, in terms increasingly aimed at the era’s liberal consensus.  In the Partisan Review, Mary McCarthy wrote that the New Yorker’s brand of liberalism merely dovetailed consumption and shallow democratic principles into a façade of good taste and knowingness.  In Dissent, Josephine Hendin leveled similar charges. “The New Yorker mystique permits us to believe we are concerned with others while treating their lives from a position of detachment, voyeurism, or even hostility,” she observed.  “It exploits the lives of those ‘in charge’ to find the ‘secret’ of their influence, and it exploits the damaged, the poor, the insane for their grotesquerie.”  In short, “its noblesse oblige is mostly noblesse.”[xiv]

These assessments seem fair in a way that Macdonald’s analysis of Thurber was not. Opinion-makers affect irony to obscure ideology or structural injustice—to excuse people from action so long as they are in on the joke.  Humorists use the same cues and conventions but hold them at arm’s length, leaving some room for discomfort and introspection.  Thurber contended that joking just for the hell of it was as dubious a proposition as creating art for art’s sake or pursuing the past on its own terms, but that one really could not do it any other way.  Putting history, art, or irony in the service of politics—or even subjecting them to academic exposition—inherently narrowed them.  “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can,” E.B. White observed, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”[xv]

All of this brings us back to Jon Stewart, whom Steve Almond rightly accuses of substituting “coy mockery” for “genuine subversion.”  While Almond worries that Stewart’s snarky approach has developed despite his “vital civic role [as] a dependable news source for…mostly young viewers,” I see the comedian’s growing (self-) importance as its primary cause.  Irony sits uneasily with established power.  Much like the New Yorker at mid-century, Stewart has waded into actual journalism and political advocacy, exchanging real irreverence for the piety of a cooler-, saner-than-thou liberalism.  He has become less a jester than a preacher, one that bullies from his pulpit.

Almond tries to provide an alternative vision, offering South Park as a show “willing to confront its viewers” and “savage both the defensive bigotry of conservatives and the self-righteous entitlement of the left.”  By “[exposing] the lazy assumptions and shallow gratifications of the viewing audience,” he suggests, Trey Parker and Matt Stone provide the sort of ironic introspection that I refer to above.  He gets stuck, however, on a crucial point.  Even as he praises South Park’s equal-opportunity insults, Almond claims that the “comic impulse’s more radical virtues” are somehow political virtues, that Stewart’s ironism is problematic only insofar as it absolves viewers of the need “[to] feel disgust, or take action.”  While condemning Stewart’s glib mixture of irony and liberalism, then, he mistakenly assumes that irony would sit comfortably with a more earnest, authentic brand of politics.  It would not.

I do not begrudge Stewart’s calls for comity or Almond’s cries of outrage, but each of them wants to be funny while also being right.  They can’t have it both ways.  Anyone who wants to improve the world would do well to leave irony home on the couch.

[i] Judith Yaross Lee, Defining New Yorker Humor (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 16; Mary F. Corey, The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

[ii] Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961).  For more on proletarian literature, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), and Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

[iii] Dwight Macdonald, “Laugh and Lie Down,” Partisan Review (December 1937): 46-50.

[iv] E.B. White, “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, February 17, 1934, 11.

[v] “The Rightist Opposition,” New Yorker, 12 May 1934, 20-22.

[vi] James Thurber, “Notes for a Proletarian Novel,” New Yorker, 9 June 1934, 15.

[vii] E.B. White, “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, 9 June 1934, 9.

[viii] James Thurber, “Voices of Revolution,” New Republic, 25 March 1936,  200-201.

[ix] E.B. White, letter to Katharine White, c.1937-1938, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections.

[x] Thomas Kunkel, Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker (New York: Random House, 1995), 183-184.

[xi] Scott Elledge, E.B. White: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1984), 188, 198-199.

[xii] Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks, eds., Selected Letters of James Thurber (Boston: Little, Brown,

1981), 15.

[xiii] E.B. White, “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, 17 February 1945, 12.

[xiv] Corey, Monocle, 37-38; Josephine Hendin, “The New Yorker as Cultural Ideal,” Dissent (Fall 1982): 450-454.

[xv] E.B. White, A Subtreasury of American Humor (New York: Modern Library, 1941), i.

Masscult and Midcult: Were Dwight Macdonald's anxieties prescient or misplaced?

Need a break from the monotony of grading? Read Jennifer Szalai's provocative review of the new collection of Dwight Macdonald's essays, edited by John Summers, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain. The essay raises a number of important questions, such as the following few: Is it a worthwhile endeavor to create hierarchies of cultural taste? Now or ever? Can high culture be democratized without losing its Avant-Garde critical edge?

This last question is particularly important in the work of our very own Tim Lacy, who is writing a book on the history of the Great Books project championed by Mortimer Adler (Macdonald was a harsh critic of the Great Books, made clear in Szalai's review). As Tim argues, Adler and his cohort believed democracy and high culture, or scholasticism, should go well together. This was their intellectual rationale for the Great Books. But Tim also makes clear that, despite such noble impulses, the Great Books must be understood in terms of commerce. As such, he analyzes the ways in which the Great Books operated not only as an intellectual and democratizing project, but also as a moneymaking venture. Great Books salespeople frightened their customers into buying their product, playing on the status anxieties of parents who sought to raise successful children in a society that increasingly valued education as necessary cultural capital. So it seems Tim both agrees and disagrees with Macdonald, who saw the Great Books as hopelessly midcult. For those interested, Tim makes the case for Great Books Liberalism in one of his more memorable posts.

Szalai is ultimately very critical of Macdonald's analysis of taste. Here's a "taste" of her analysis:

So much of Macdonald’s critical system relies on distinctions of “taste” that it’s curious how uncritically he trusted the term, using it as shorthand whenever he made a tenuous claim he couldn’t argue his way out of. But taste is a slippery concept, one that is informed, arguably or inevitably, by wealth, birth and education. Taste is cultural capital, and making distinctions of what is in good taste and bad is a way for social classes to distinguish themselves from and compete with one another. Macdonald took his Marxist critique only so far; he could see how culture could be commodified and manufactured, and how the masses were buying cultural products they believed could hoist them up into the rarefied ranks of the elite, but he assumed that tastes were a given, which meant he sometimes wrote as if his own good taste were the inevitable result of, well, good taste. This circular reasoning is less a problem in his reviews of specific books or movies, where it was incumbent on him to explain why exactly he liked or disliked the work in question, but in a big essay like “Masscult and Midcult,” he could get swept away by the swell of generalization, as presumptuous of mass taste as he was of his own.

If, as he believed, taste was inviolable, then so much middlebrow striving was bound to be a sad little exercise in futility. Any attempt by the masses to edify themselves was like a children’s game—they were playing dress-up with clothes ten sizes too big. The Great Books project, midlist fiction, publications from the “Lucepapers” to Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly: if it was aimed at a general audience, it was a candidate for his derision

Referential Slipperiness: Bourgeois, Bourgoisie, And American Class Anti-Intellectualism

Long-time USIH reader Varad Mehta posted this piece from Slate---"Is 'Middlebrow' Still an Insult?" by David Haglund---on our Facebook page. He added this short article from Maria Popova as a supplemental read. Both intelligently discuss now well-known problems of the high, middle, and low cultural distinction tropes (i.e. these categories are historically shifting matters of perception, made problematic by the advent of mass culture and the ongoing development of democratic cultural forms in the twentieth century).

The occasion for Haglund's post is that The New York Review of Books is issuing a new collection of Dwight Macdonald's classic essays, titled Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain.* It will be of interest to USIH readers that the editor is John Summers, and the collection contains an introduction by Louis Menand. [*Who knew that NYRB published books, let alone essay collections and "classics"?]

Haglund's article is a first-rate abstract on the history and usage of the "brow hierarachy" for cultural theory novices. Explore all the links if you have some time. Otherwise, near the top Haglund refers to a line from Menand in the collection, about "Masscult and Midcult," that reads as follows: "Louis Menand...calls the title essay 'a kind of summa of the New York highbrow’s contempt for bourgeois culture.' "

This created an immediate disjunct for me; the line derailed me from finishing the article for another 15-20 minutes. Why? Far be it from me to question the thinking and prose of Menand (I bow at his feet...seriously), but aren't "the highbrow," as a class, either overlapping or the same as the bourgeoisie? After a bit I realized that this muddled use of the term "bourgeois"---especially in relation to American class categories---has bothered me for some time. As a quick and dirty reference* and review, I scanned Wikipedia's entry for bourgeois---which immediately redirected me to its entry for bourgeoisie. [*I'm shocked with myself that I had never tried to explore this etymology before, but that's a question I'll leave for another day---chalking it up, for now, to the usual professional distractions.]

The opening line of the Wikipedia piece reminds us that bourgeois and bourgeoisie are moving targets---as nouns representative of groups of people over time. It's a fairly obvious point, and I knew that Marx's bourgeoisie was not the same as bourgeois described by communists, socialists, and class-aware academic types all through the twentieth century. In other words, I knew the term did not strictly describe a group that owns the means of production---that bourgeois describes an attitude, a disposition, or a cultural matrix, and not just one's economic means.

What has bothered me for so long, however, is the inbred, slippery nature of the term bourgeois when it's used as a pejorative. Those who use the term are usually of an upper-middle (economic) class background, or of a minority of disaffected upper class, and they use it to describe the materialism of their hereditary social set. It's those who, by training or empathetic moral sensibilities, use the term to describe the lack of a true Christian gentility in their peers (i.e. modern condescension).

Proof the term's inbred nature lies in the fact that it feels awkward to imagine lower or working-class folks accusing those of relatively higher classes of being bourgeois. First, it's not a regular part of lower class or lower middle class vocabulary, at least as I've experienced, first-hand, those categories of income/wealth. Furthermore, the inherent American anti-intellectualism of large swaths of the American working class preclude use of the term: you would be "putting on airs" by using three-syllable word when you can use the one-syllable "snob."

Consulting a common reference book, the online Merriam-Webster (MW) dictionary, we find this definition of "bourgeoisie":

1. Middle class; also plural in construction : members of the middle class
2. A social order dominated by bourgeois

And here's MW's definition of bourgeois:

1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of the social middle class
2. Marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity
3. Dominated by commercial and industrial interests : capitalistic

So if we strictly followed MW's normalization of both terms, we would not use either term to describe America's upper classes of capital owners and accumulators.

Things get more confusing, or slippery, when we recall that Americans normalize "middle class" to include large swaths of the upper and working classes; it's used by both of the latter as a term of humility and aspiration, respectively.

In other words, the American bourgeois and/or bourgeoisie includes---by definition (literally above) and convention (usage of the terms)---probably 75-80 percent of the American populace. Even so, we hardly ever observe the terms in use except, as noted above, in upper-middle and upper class circles. In those circles it's a pejorative, not a class descriptor.

In sum, in American culture and history the terms bourgeois and bourgeoisie have no stable meaning in relation to communicating real economic information across American classes. If you use these terms, you're likely to confuse your audience---especially those in America's bourgeois middle class. We don't even have, or teach, the baseline knowledge of Marx to utilize as a referential starting point. We are so startlingly and willfully blind to class distinctions in our education establishment (not in everyday life, where we are acutely aware of them) that we have no shared vocabulary to discuss inequality. Our "economic class anti-intellectualism" prevents us from understanding the nature of the bourgeoisie as Marx communicated the term.

There's much more we can say about this topic, but I'll stop now to let you take over. What have I missed? What have I exaggerated? How am I missing the larger picture?* - TL

[*I'm serious here because I wrote this post while in a late-night, post-midterm grading haze of exhaustion.]

Vanderlan Responds to Haberski

I want to thank Ray Haberski for his thoughtful and positive review of Intellectuals Incorporated. Haberski judges the book important, he captures the general thrust of the argument, and he effectively chooses some of the more significant figures – MacLeish, Macdonald, and Agee – to illustrate his points. Most gratifying to me, Haberski finds the portrayals of the individual writers to be compellingly complicated. I hoped to offer a book that advanced a provocative argument about the place of intellectuals in mid-century America while still retaining a sense of the messy peculiarities of each writer’s life. It is encouraging to see Haberski respond to both aspirations.

Haberski rightfully describes my book as a “portrait of the abdication of intellectuals to the ethos of the market.” Ironically, I would add, the abdication took place not so much on the part of the writers who struggled to work for Luce and his magazines – writers such as MacLeish, Agee, Whyte and others – but instead by those who insisted that intellectuals must not work for mass culture magazines. Writers such as Irving Howe, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald spent the post war years insisting that mass culture was hostile to intellectual life. As Howe put it in 1952, when intellectuals “became absorbed into” organizations such as Time Inc. “they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.” This is a familiar argument, and Haberski is right to suggest that combatting that notion lies at the heart of my motivation in writing the book. Too often, as I try to demonstrate, such criticism left intellectuals cut off from the main currents of society.

Haberski understands this. At other times, however, Haberski comes close to echoing the assumptions I try to call into question. Noting the many works produced by Time Inc. intellectuals for other publications, Haberski concludes “it was their moonlighting that gave them integrity.” I disagree, in two ways. First, I seek to show that is was possible – difficult, but possible – to write with integrity for Time and Fortune. My book is an argument against the idea that it is necessary to discard your values in order to work for an organization. Second, while it is true that the best work by these intellectuals usually appeared in other places, I repeatedly show how that work was crucially and necessarily tied to their journalism in the Luce magazines. The examples Haberski cites, Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Hersey’s Hiroshima, Whyte’s Organization Man, all owe their existence to each author’s journalism for Time and Fortune. Writing as journalists for Luce was crucial to each writer, selecting their topic, informing their technique, and frequently providing a practice of conventional journalism to argue against.

At the risk of sounding churlish, one note in Harberski’s review caught me off guard. He complains that Luce “plays a minor” role in the book, noting that he does not even appear in the index. Haberski is right. Luce does not appear in the index, but the reason is quite the opposite of what Haberski suggests. The publisher’s index guidelines suggest not constructing index entries for the main subjects of a book, and given that Luce’s name appears on 207 pages of the book (ah, the fun of searchable pdf.’s), we decided to leave him out. The decision seemed reasonable at the time; now, given Haberski’s reading, not so much.

More seriously, though, Haberski is half right to note that Luce’s actual role in the book is somewhat minor, especially (and unsurprisingly) compared with Alan Brinkley’s recent biography. Luce figures quite heavily in the early portion of Intellectuals Incorporated (much of the second chapter, on the creation of Time and Fortune, is devoted to him). But he does retreat to a less central role once his magazines are established, and this is purposeful. It is my contention that Luce was less important to the content of his magazine’s than previous accounts suggest.

Careful readers of Brinkley’s biography might have noted a paradox. Like most previous scholars, Brinkley treats Time, Fortune, and Life magazines as reflecting Luce’s view of the world. The magazines, he asserts, were an accurate representation of Luce’s beliefs. At the same time, Brinkley acknowledges the many, many times Luce complained that his editors and writers ignored his wishes, publishing views they knew he opposed. Brinkley never reconciles the paradox, but it disappears if we take seriously the efforts of the editors and writers whom were actually publishing the magazines on a weekly and monthly basis. Much of the time Luce was absent from the daily fights over the contents of his magazines, and even when he was present he was only one voice, and not always the most important voice, in the discussion. Recognizing this is important, I believe, in better understanding the possibilities for individual intervention, even within the heart of the so-called culture industries.

At the heart of the neo-liberalism discussion, and at times, seemingly, at the heart of our entire contemporary culture, lies the frustration that the logic of free market economics seems so all encompassing, so unassailable. And at the same time, corporate power seems so pervasive, often cloaked by comforting images of individual entrepreneurs and efficient profit maximizers. Haberski sees something “brilliant and tragic” in my story “because one can see the last vestiges of a community willing to reflect on itself in light of imperatives and values larger than its own self-interest.” I agree, though I am unconvinced it must be that way, unconvinced that the sorts of arguments contesting self-interest offered by the intellectuals I write about – arguments based on notions of service, of responsibility, of factual and moral inquiry, of representation – cannot still find purchase in our world.

Haberski leads his review with Archibald MacLeish. Writing in “The Irresponsibles,” MacLeish criticizes those writers who seek to wall themselves off from the larger world, either through devotion to the private claims of art or the parochial demands of scholarship. He offers an unfashionable bold assertion of the role of the poet and the power of ideas: “poetry alone imagines, and imagining creates, the world than men wish to live in and make true.” We don’t have to subscribe to MacLeish’s idealism to recognize the power in that conviction. Or to seek to recover its power.

Vanderlan Responds to Haberski

I want to thank Ray Haberski for his thoughtful and positive review of Intellectuals Incorporated. Haberski judges the book important, he captures the general thrust of the argument, and he effectively chooses some of the more significant figures – MacLeish, Macdonald, and Agee – to illustrate his points. Most gratifying to me, Haberski finds the portrayals of the individual writers to be compellingly complicated. I hoped to offer a book that advanced a provocative argument about the place of intellectuals in mid-century America while still retaining a sense of the messy peculiarities of each writer’s life. It is encouraging to see Haberski respond to both aspirations.

Haberski rightfully describes my book as a “portrait of the abdication of intellectuals to the ethos of the market.” Ironically, I would add, the abdication took place not so much on the part of the writers who struggled to work for Luce and his magazines – writers such as MacLeish, Agee, Whyte and others – but instead by those who insisted that intellectuals must not work for mass culture magazines. Writers such as Irving Howe, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald spent the post war years insisting that mass culture was hostile to intellectual life. As Howe put it in 1952, when intellectuals “became absorbed into” organizations such as Time Inc. “they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.” This is a familiar argument, and Haberski is right to suggest that combatting that notion lies at the heart of my motivation in writing the book. Too often, as I try to demonstrate, such criticism left intellectuals cut off from the main currents of society.

Haberski understands this. At other times, however, Haberski comes close to echoing the assumptions I try to call into question. Noting the many works produced by Time Inc. intellectuals for other publications, Haberski concludes “it was their moonlighting that gave them integrity.” I disagree, in two ways. First, I seek to show that is was possible – difficult, but possible – to write with integrity for Time and Fortune. My book is an argument against the idea that it is necessary to discard your values in order to work for an organization. Second, while it is true that the best work by these intellectuals usually appeared in other places, I repeatedly show how that work was crucially and necessarily tied to their journalism in the Luce magazines. The examples Haberski cites, Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Hersey’s Hiroshima, Whyte’s Organization Man, all owe their existence to each author’s journalism for Time and Fortune. Writing as journalists for Luce was crucial to each writer, selecting their topic, informing their technique, and frequently providing a practice of conventional journalism to argue against.

At the risk of sounding churlish, one note in Harberski’s review caught me off guard. He complains that Luce “plays a minor” role in the book, noting that he does not even appear in the index. Haberski is right. Luce does not appear in the index, but the reason is quite the opposite of what Haberski suggests. The publisher’s index guidelines suggest not constructing index entries for the main subjects of a book, and given that Luce’s name appears on 207 pages of the book (ah, the fun of searchable pdf.’s), we decided to leave him out. The decision seemed reasonable at the time; now, given Haberski’s reading, not so much.

More seriously, though, Haberski is half right to note that Luce’s actual role in the book is somewhat minor, especially (and unsurprisingly) compared with Alan Brinkley’s recent biography. Luce figures quite heavily in the early portion of Intellectuals Incorporated (much of the second chapter, on the creation of Time and Fortune, is devoted to him). But he does retreat to a less central role once his magazines are established, and this is purposeful. It is my contention that Luce was less important to the content of his magazine’s than previous accounts suggest.

Careful readers of Brinkley’s biography might have noted a paradox. Like most previous scholars, Brinkley treats Time, Fortune, and Life magazines as reflecting Luce’s view of the world. The magazines, he asserts, were an accurate representation of Luce’s beliefs. At the same time, Brinkley acknowledges the many, many times Luce complained that his editors and writers ignored his wishes, publishing views they knew he opposed. Brinkley never reconciles the paradox, but it disappears if we take seriously the efforts of the editors and writers whom were actually publishing the magazines on a weekly and monthly basis. Much of the time Luce was absent from the daily fights over the contents of his magazines, and even when he was present he was only one voice, and not always the most important voice, in the discussion. Recognizing this is important, I believe, in better understanding the possibilities for individual intervention, even within the heart of the so-called culture industries.

At the heart of the neo-liberalism discussion, and at times, seemingly, at the heart of our entire contemporary culture, lies the frustration that the logic of free market economics seems so all encompassing, so unassailable. And at the same time, corporate power seems so pervasive, often cloaked by comforting images of individual entrepreneurs and efficient profit maximizers. Haberski sees something “brilliant and tragic” in my story “because one can see the last vestiges of a community willing to reflect on itself in light of imperatives and values larger than its own self-interest.” I agree, though I am unconvinced it must be that way, unconvinced that the sorts of arguments contesting self-interest offered by the intellectuals I write about – arguments based on notions of service, of responsibility, of factual and moral inquiry, of representation – cannot still find purchase in our world.

Haberski leads his review with Archibald MacLeish. Writing in “The Irresponsibles,” MacLeish criticizes those writers who seek to wall themselves off from the larger world, either through devotion to the private claims of art or the parochial demands of scholarship. He offers an unfashionable bold assertion of the role of the poet and the power of ideas: “poetry alone imagines, and imagining creates, the world than men wish to live in and make true.” We don’t have to subscribe to MacLeish’s idealism to recognize the power in that conviction. Or to seek to recover its power.

Review of Robert Vanderlan, INTELLECTUALS INCORPORATED: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce's Media Empire

Robert Vanderlan, Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce's Media Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)

About a third of the way into Robert Vanderlan’s important study of intellectuals who worked for Time Inc., one encounters the heroic Archibald MacLeish. Frankly, we don’t hear much about MacLeish these days—perhaps we should. At least Vanderlan makes a persuasive case to take MacLeish seriously, not merely because of his versatility—as an editor for Fortune, a poet, playwright, essayist, and Librarian of Congress—but because he asked a question that echoes in my ears today. In 1940, as Europe descended into the most horrific war in human history, MacLeish gave an address he entitled, “The Irresponsibles.” As Vanderlan writes, MacLeish began “with a question he feared would be asked by historians in the future as they worked ‘in the paper rubbish of our lives.’ Why did scholars and writers in the United States, ‘witnesses as they were to the destruction of writing and of scholarship in great areas of Europe,’ and ‘to the exile and the imprisonment and murder’ of writers and scholars, not react more forcefully to the danger?” (131) MacLeish’s answer: because intellectuals had retreated into themselves, their professions, their craft, their minds; and while many aspired to great, long-lasting works, most settled comfortably (far too comfortably for MacLeish) into the “organization of intellectual life in our time.”

Review of Robert Vanderlan, INTELLECTUALS INCORPORATED: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce's Media Empire

Robert Vanderlan, Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce's Media Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)

About a third of the way into Robert Vanderlan’s important study of intellectuals who worked for Time Inc., one encounters the heroic Archibald MacLeish. Frankly, we don’t hear much about MacLeish these days—perhaps we should. At least Vanderlan makes a persuasive case to take MacLeish seriously, not merely because of his versatility—as an editor for Fortune, a poet, playwright, essayist, and Librarian of Congress—but because he asked a question that echoes in my ears today. In 1940, as Europe descended into the most horrific war in human history, MacLeish gave an address he entitled, “The Irresponsibles.” As Vanderlan writes, MacLeish began “with a question he feared would be asked by historians in the future as they worked ‘in the paper rubbish of our lives.’ Why did scholars and writers in the United States, ‘witnesses as they were to the destruction of writing and of scholarship in great areas of Europe,’ and ‘to the exile and the imprisonment and murder’ of writers and scholars, not react more forcefully to the danger?” (131) MacLeish’s answer: because intellectuals had retreated into themselves, their professions, their craft, their minds; and while many aspired to great, long-lasting works, most settled comfortably (far too comfortably for MacLeish) into the “organization of intellectual life in our time.”