A Novel for Modern America

I teach a course at Marian University called "Modern America," which basically allows me to teach different themes in post-1932 United States History.  Besides trying to find interesting and suitable monographs on this period--a challenge that changes every time I teach the course--I also like to have the students read at least one novel.  In the past, I have had them read a volume from John Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy, but this time around I am thinking about using a volume from another trilogy, American Pastoral from Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy.  As many readers of the blog probably already now, Michael Kimmage has an impressive book on this series entitled, In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy.

I am interested in what other folks assign by way of fiction in courses on modern America.  And certainly I am interested in how people who have taught Philip Roth think of using one of his novels in a history course.  In the past I have used everything from Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick, to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.  Almost always, my students groan at first about having to read a novel and then end up having more to say about it than any other text--especially since I try to pair the novel with related monographs. 

So what novels do other people assign in modern America history courses?

Wolfgang Koeppen's Journey through America

A translation of Wolfgang Koeppen's Journey through America, a travelogue published in 1959, is now available in English. S-USIH's Michael Kimmage, who is on this year's conference program again, is the translator. 

Michael writes: "The book is full of read meat for students of American intellectual history or full of fresh vegetables, depending on your taste."

Philip Roth’s Merry Levov as the Return of the Repressed

Philip Roth, aka Nathan Zuckerman

Lately I have been reading Philip Roth novels at night before bed. Although I grew up devouring fiction, I have not been much of a fiction reader since I began graduate school. This shift in my reading habits owes to both utility and taste. As for the former reason, I have come to feel I don’t have enough time to read fiction: there’s simply too much non-fiction—historical, theoretical, political—that must be read in order for me to stay current as a scholar. And to the latter, I have come to almost prefer non-fiction.

But now that I am in the midst of the long march through my manuscript, my brain is simply too tired most nights to read the type of non-fiction I typically consume. Moreover, I have discovered that reading excellent fictional storytelling is inspiration to my own prose. Thus, Philip Roth.

But I must be honest that my turn to Roth novels is not merely escapist. It is rather tinged with scholarly curiosity that was engendered by listening to Michael Kimmage give a fantastic talk at last year’s USIH conference titled, “Philip Roth’s American Tragedy.” The talk was taken from the book Kimmage has coming out this year with Stanford University Press, In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Tragedy. If you’d like a preview, I found this article.

Kimmage examines the three books Roth wrote from 1997 to 2000, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman narrates all three books. And they have much else in common, which is why Kimmage treats them as the “Newark Trilogy” or “Newark Tragedy”:

They constitute a "Newark Trilogy," because Newark, New Jersey is central to all three novels. Newark is both a place where characters grow up and live a thematic imperative: it is where history begins for the novels' two Jewish and one African-American protagonists. Each of these protagonists escapes Newark only to find himself in the grip of powerful historical forces. They are thus reduced from powerful men to the playthings of history. In search of emancipation from the past, the heroes of the Newark Trilogy fall into history, and they do so without the protection of a well-defined personal or family history. Looked at together, the Newark Trilogy explores the will to live outside history. By explicating the failure to live outside history, the Newark Trilogy illustrates the mechanics of history itself.

I recently completed American Pastoral. I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize. I assume most of you have read it so I won’t describe the plot in much detail. It’s about Newark Jewish hometown hero Seymour “the Swede” Levov who translates the athletic prowess of his adolescence into success as a businessman, following in his father’s footsteps as a glove manufacturer. Levov moves his wife, the former Miss New Jersey, and his daughter, Merry, to the upscale, mostly Protestant exurb Rimrock. He is living the American Dream. His Thanksgiving dinners, which bring together his Jewish parents and his Catholic in-laws in mutual celebrations of the civil religion, are the American Pastoral. But all of this is disrupted when his daughter Merry becomes militantly antiwar and, at the young age of 16, blows up the Rimrock post office, killing one innocent man. Merry spends the next five years on the run before turning up living on the streets of Newark, a converted Jain whom the Swede determines is mentally ill.

In the midst of writing the chapters of my book on the sixties, I found Roth’s historical allusions compelling. This, of course, is Kimmage’s point:

The "Newark trilogy" rests on three claims about history. The first is history's malevolent force. The second is that postwar America is an experiment in the evasion of history. America offers the seductive promise that history can be escaped, and at no time was this promise more widespread and believable (to Americans) than in the years between 1945 and the late 1960's, between the Second World War and the Vietnam War, the "thirty glorious years," as they are called in France. If history is destruction, America suggests that it can also be security and stability and, with luck, prosperity. If history is malevolent, postwar America held out the prospect that history could be sweet and rewarding, all that is contained in the simplest meaning of the title, American Pastoral. Where can a poor immigrant family go but up in America? In its promise of good fortune, America is offering a dangerous illusion, and the three protagonists of the "Newark Trilogy" remake themselves in the image of a benign history. They share the illusion that they can live for the future without fitting themselves and their families into the past, the illusion that they can be what they wish to be, whatever new creation they choose out of the bottomless American possibilities. One protagonist is born black and lives as a white man. Another is born to Jewish poverty in Newark and makes a living pretending to be Abraham Lincoln. A third is born Jewish but is known as the Swede. This Nordic hero's mastery of American success is so complete that his background disappears from his name and his physical appearance. This is the third claim that the "Newark trilogy" makes about history. Those who try to escape it are punished with even greater zeal by the moody gods of history.

I agree entirely with Kimmage’s analysis here. By this, Merry Levov, a caricature of the "bad" sixties, represents the return of the repressed. She is the punishment that the Swede must suffer for seeking to evade history, for seeking shelter from history in the American Pastoral. Roth, through literature, theorizes history. What can literature offer history?

The current issue of the London Review of Books includes one of Perry Anderson's typically expansive and brilliant essays (is there a better living historical essayist?), this one on the work of Carlo Ginzburg, whom many of you might know as the author of The Cheese and the Worms. Anderson argues that Ginzburg’s hyper-attention to epistemology might be thought strange given his micro-historical approach. But Anderson contends that Ginzburg’s interest in epistemology stems from his wish to bracket off history from literature, even though he finds the latter compelling as historical theory. Anderson writes:

What might explain this? A more compelling answer lies in the sources of Ginzburg’s historical sensibility. His first ambitions, he has told us, were literary. He has also said that once he turned to history, his permanent inspiration became Auerbach’s Mimesis, the reconstruction by a literary scholar of the path to modern realism, from the Odyssey to Virginia Woolf, whose route included Ammianus, Gregory of Tours, Saint-Simon, historians and memorialists along with poets and novelists. Literature thus both preceded history in Ginzburg’s cursus, and has always thereafter lain adjacent to it. There is a long tradition of the practice of history as a branch of literature, but what this has usually meant is either a studied elegance (or unbridled flamboyance) of style – Gibbon or Michelet – closer to works of imagination than of record, or the quasi-reproduction of literary genres in the construction of narratives: for obvious reasons, epic and tragedy – Motley or Deutscher – more frequently than comedy or romance.

The bearing of literature on history, however, is of a different order for Ginzburg, and is original to him. In his work, literature is taken not as a standard of styles, nor a repertoire of genres, but as a tool of knowledge. In one essay after another, he has insisted that what novelists or poets can bring to an objective study of the past are cognitive instruments: techniques of estrangement as social critique in Tolstoy, free direct style as passage to a new interiority in Stendhal, ellipsis as at once suspender and accelerator of time in Flaubert, unmediated visualisation as access to fresh insight in Proust. But, of course, these are instruments to be found within what remain fictions. It is from this standpoint, quite specific to Ginzburg, that the modern scepticism that would erase the boundary between history and fiction altogether – Hayden White, already criticised by Momigliano, is the King Charles’s Head here – becomes such a bugbear. Not so much because it looms large in the discipline, but because it threatens the integrity of one conjugation of literature and history with false proximity to another, deleterious one.

Additional thoughts on the relationship between literature and historical thinking?

Historically Speaking: “America in an Age of Fracture: A Forum”

Today’s post is an overview of the forum on Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, which appears in the pages of the April 2011 edition of Historically Speaking. I highly recommend that everyone read the forum. For those yet to read it, this post will serve as a sort of CliffsNotes version.

Rodgers introduces the roundtable discussion with a better encapsulation of his argument than anything he writes in the book itself. He contends that sometime during the 1970s a revolution in the American experience occurred. This revolution, though, was not political. “The battles over taxes and regulation that Reagan’s election precipitated represented no revolutionary break with history,” he writes. “Even the ‘culture wars’ and their partisan mobilization of religious loyalties replayed long-standing strains in 20th-century American politics.” Rodgers concedes that the economic realm was transformed to some degree. But the most profound metamorphosis occurred in social thought. Intellectual history matters! “A whole vocabulary of concepts that had once seemed the common sense of social thought weakened and new languages took their place.” We’ve discussed at length the new “vocabulary of concepts.” In short, more and more Americans began to think in smaller and smaller units. The individual replaced society in our ethical imaginations.

Rodgers anticipates an important criticism when he asks whether or not areas existed that transcended fracture. His conclusion: yes and no. For example: “Religious communities on the religious side of the culture wars stressed not individual autonomy but loyalties and obligations. And yet, built on their own consumer economies, drawing their members through defection from their mainstream rivals during what was said to be a general religious revival but was, in fact, a great reshuffling of faiths in the spiritual marketplace, the socially conservative churches, too, lived within worlds of choice.” In politics, even social conservatives, those most likely to summon duty, obligation, and order, reframed their language around individual rights. School prayer was their right—an argument that would have been alien to earlier moral establishmentarians who argued that a Christian public sphere was necessary for social order.

The first response in the forum comes from Bruce Schulman, who paradoxically claims that Rodgers’s “age of fracture” represents a new form of consensus history. Schulman believes that Rodgers’s sense that fracture was everywhere is a form of consensus history. “Beneath the veneer of conflict and partisanship that occasions so much handwringing in contemporary political discourse, Rodgers discerns remarkable harmony,” Schulman writes. “Indeed, ‘Age of Fracture’ refers not to the absence of, or the collapse of, an intellectual consensus, but rather to the creation of one—the widespread resonance of a view of the world as atomized, indeterminate, fractured.” This is an interesting way of thinking about Age of Fracture that I had not entertained. But I’m not sure it makes sense. The original consensus historians like Hofstadter believed that basic agreement existed among most Americans about first principles—capitalism and democracy. Rodgers, on the other hand, assumes that American social thought was increasingly disaggregated. Disaggregation as a common trend might imply that Americans were all caught in the same slipstream, but it hardly entails agreement over first principles. Although Schulman is quick to point out that there are far worse things than being lumped with Hofstadter, his most damning critique is that Rodgers repeats Hofstadter’s nostalgia. I don’t think Hofstadter or Rodgers work from a position of nostalgia.

Melani McAlister writes the next essay in the forum. Her forte is popular culture (check out her brilliant book Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 for a taste). As such, the gist of her essay is that, though she thinks Rodgers’s book is an excellent exploration of “the hothouse of journals and academic presses,” his narrative of fracture might have been complicated by going “to the movies.” In other words, unlike in other forms of social thought, centralized forms of power have prevailed in film since the 1970s. “In the imagination of Hollywood ‘the system’ is not fractured or dissipated, it is alive and well.” For support she cites Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), No Way Out (1987), Mission Impossible (1996), The Pelican Brief (1993), The Game (1997), and, most importantly, The Matrix (1999) and its sequels. The bulk of McAlister’s essay then follows as an analysis of power in The Matrix, “a near perfect exemplar of the mix of fears and delights that infused American reactions to the globalization of culture and the rise of new, powerful technologies that were in the process of transforming daily experience.” I really enjoyed this essay, but it left me unsatisfied. It is a fairly serious critique of Rodgers, but only by way of arguing that Rodgers omitted something important. One might assume that the social thought represented by film exists in an alternative universe to that represented by, say, gender theory, where Judith Butler’s theory of identity fracture seems very different from the “system.” Or does it? If we reverse the vectors of intellectual history (as Warren Susman and James Livingston advise) we should be able to bring popular culture and “high” intellectual history together. Let me briefly attempt to do this.

Rodgers points to Foucault’s theory of power as an early sign of fracture. But I would argue that his theory of power, upon which Butler based her thinking about gender, was as follows: rather than residing in the agency of sovereign subjects, power was too diffuse to be contained by mere individuals. In other words, power was not to be found solely in a specific political sphere but rather in the “politics of everyday life,” which lent philosophical support to the feminist slogan that the “personal is political.” But more important to the poststructuralist feminist theorizing of Butler, such a conception introduced the idea that power shaped people positively rather than negatively, that people acted out of desire rather than fear. So, as Nemo has written in his review of Rodgers, Butler continued to think about power, but differently. And the way she thinks about power, as diffuse but somewhere out there, playing on our desires, is precisely how power—“the system”—works in a film like The Matrix.

Michael Kimmage follows McAlister and offers one of the more insightful critiques of Age of Fracture. Thought he thinks the argument—“the will to have less in common is what Americans had in common in the 1980s and 1990s”—is brilliantly fleshed out, Kimmage disagrees with one of Rodgers’s counterintuitive historical revisions, made in the first chapter on Reagan’s presidential rhetoric. Rodgers believes that Reagan, who is often credited for winning the Cold War, in fact lost the words for the Cold War because he lost the words for the nation. Kimmage, in contrast, contends that Reagan indeed sought the nation. Reagan’s nationalism, Kimmage correctly points out, stemmed from U.S. intellectual history: “Since the early 1970s neoconservative intellectuals—Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick—had done what the could to articulate a workable ideology of American nationalism, less in the sphere of political economy than in the sphere of international relations.” To this degree, distinctions must be drawn between right and left in ways that Rodgers seems unwilling to do.

Donald Critchlow makes a similar point in his contention that fracture was far from widespread, especially when it comes to nationalism. He writes: “The belief that the United States is an exceptional country prevails among most Americans.” “This abiding faith in the free market, the rule of law, equal opportunity, and balanced government has enabled conservatives to construct a narrative that appeals to the American electorate.” Critchlow concludes: “ours is not an age of fracture, but of intellectual confusion on the part of some.” Now, to a certain degree, this avoids Rodgers’s main argument, that the revolution from aggregation to disaggregation occurred in the realm of social thought, not in the realm of politics. But I think it does open up an important point of departure: How fractured is the age when most Americans agree that their nation is exceptional? Does this assume too much?—Do most Americans even think the nation exceptional?

In Rodgers’s concluding remarks, he briefly ponders the question of the American nation. Though he says that his career has long been a search for America, he concedes that “America” cannot be found because “America is an argument: a big, multitudinous, often contradictory amalgam of persons, experiences, aspirations, and dissents.”

---------------------

As an aside, it appears that Rodgers has been tuning into our discussion. He writes: “In the intellectual history blogs and again in this exchange, questions of the casual assumptions behind Age of Fracture have been pressed forward. Which foot moved first? Did the economic transformations of late capitalism set loose these new debates? Or did ideas move first? My response is neither and both.”

Historically Speaking: “America in an Age of Fracture: A Forum”

Today’s post is an overview of the forum on Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, which appears in the pages of the April 2011 edition of Historically Speaking. I highly recommend that everyone read the forum. For those yet to read it, this post will serve as a sort of CliffsNotes version.

Rodgers introduces the roundtable discussion with a better encapsulation of his argument than anything he writes in the book itself. He contends that sometime during the 1970s a revolution in the American experience occurred. This revolution, though, was not political. “The battles over taxes and regulation that Reagan’s election precipitated represented no revolutionary break with history,” he writes. “Even the ‘culture wars’ and their partisan mobilization of religious loyalties replayed long-standing strains in 20th-century American politics.” Rodgers concedes that the economic realm was transformed to some degree. But the most profound metamorphosis occurred in social thought. Intellectual history matters! “A whole vocabulary of concepts that had once seemed the common sense of social thought weakened and new languages took their place.” We’ve discussed at length the new “vocabulary of concepts.” In short, more and more Americans began to think in smaller and smaller units. The individual replaced society in our ethical imaginations.

Rodgers anticipates an important criticism when he asks whether or not areas existed that transcended fracture. His conclusion: yes and no. For example: “Religious communities on the religious side of the culture wars stressed not individual autonomy but loyalties and obligations. And yet, built on their own consumer economies, drawing their members through defection from their mainstream rivals during what was said to be a general religious revival but was, in fact, a great reshuffling of faiths in the spiritual marketplace, the socially conservative churches, too, lived within worlds of choice.” In politics, even social conservatives, those most likely to summon duty, obligation, and order, reframed their language around individual rights. School prayer was their right—an argument that would have been alien to earlier moral establishmentarians who argued that a Christian public sphere was necessary for social order.

The first response in the forum comes from Bruce Schulman, who paradoxically claims that Rodgers’s “age of fracture” represents a new form of consensus history. Schulman believes that Rodgers’s sense that fracture was everywhere is a form of consensus history. “Beneath the veneer of conflict and partisanship that occasions so much handwringing in contemporary political discourse, Rodgers discerns remarkable harmony,” Schulman writes. “Indeed, ‘Age of Fracture’ refers not to the absence of, or the collapse of, an intellectual consensus, but rather to the creation of one—the widespread resonance of a view of the world as atomized, indeterminate, fractured.” This is an interesting way of thinking about Age of Fracture that I had not entertained. But I’m not sure it makes sense. The original consensus historians like Hofstadter believed that basic agreement existed among most Americans about first principles—capitalism and democracy. Rodgers, on the other hand, assumes that American social thought was increasingly disaggregated. Disaggregation as a common trend might imply that Americans were all caught in the same slipstream, but it hardly entails agreement over first principles. Although Schulman is quick to point out that there are far worse things than being lumped with Hofstadter, his most damning critique is that Rodgers repeats Hofstadter’s nostalgia. I don’t think Hofstadter or Rodgers work from a position of nostalgia.

Melani McAlister writes the next essay in the forum. Her forte is popular culture (check out her brilliant book Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 for a taste). As such, the gist of her essay is that, though she thinks Rodgers’s book is an excellent exploration of “the hothouse of journals and academic presses,” his narrative of fracture might have been complicated by going “to the movies.” In other words, unlike in other forms of social thought, centralized forms of power have prevailed in film since the 1970s. “In the imagination of Hollywood ‘the system’ is not fractured or dissipated, it is alive and well.” For support she cites Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), No Way Out (1987), Mission Impossible (1996), The Pelican Brief (1993), The Game (1997), and, most importantly, The Matrix (1999) and its sequels. The bulk of McAlister’s essay then follows as an analysis of power in The Matrix, “a near perfect exemplar of the mix of fears and delights that infused American reactions to the globalization of culture and the rise of new, powerful technologies that were in the process of transforming daily experience.” I really enjoyed this essay, but it left me unsatisfied. It is a fairly serious critique of Rodgers, but only by way of arguing that Rodgers omitted something important. One might assume that the social thought represented by film exists in an alternative universe to that represented by, say, gender theory, where Judith Butler’s theory of identity fracture seems very different from the “system.” Or does it? If we reverse the vectors of intellectual history (as Warren Susman and James Livingston advise) we should be able to bring popular culture and “high” intellectual history together. Let me briefly attempt to do this.

Rodgers points to Foucault’s theory of power as an early sign of fracture. But I would argue that his theory of power, upon which Butler based her thinking about gender, was as follows: rather than residing in the agency of sovereign subjects, power was too diffuse to be contained by mere individuals. In other words, power was not to be found solely in a specific political sphere but rather in the “politics of everyday life,” which lent philosophical support to the feminist slogan that the “personal is political.” But more important to the poststructuralist feminist theorizing of Butler, such a conception introduced the idea that power shaped people positively rather than negatively, that people acted out of desire rather than fear. So, as Nemo has written in his review of Rodgers, Butler continued to think about power, but differently. And the way she thinks about power, as diffuse but somewhere out there, playing on our desires, is precisely how power—“the system”—works in a film like The Matrix.

Michael Kimmage follows McAlister and offers one of the more insightful critiques of Age of Fracture. Thought he thinks the argument—“the will to have less in common is what Americans had in common in the 1980s and 1990s”—is brilliantly fleshed out, Kimmage disagrees with one of Rodgers’s counterintuitive historical revisions, made in the first chapter on Reagan’s presidential rhetoric. Rodgers believes that Reagan, who is often credited for winning the Cold War, in fact lost the words for the Cold War because he lost the words for the nation. Kimmage, in contrast, contends that Reagan indeed sought the nation. Reagan’s nationalism, Kimmage correctly points out, stemmed from U.S. intellectual history: “Since the early 1970s neoconservative intellectuals—Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick—had done what the could to articulate a workable ideology of American nationalism, less in the sphere of political economy than in the sphere of international relations.” To this degree, distinctions must be drawn between right and left in ways that Rodgers seems unwilling to do.

Donald Critchlow makes a similar point in his contention that fracture was far from widespread, especially when it comes to nationalism. He writes: “The belief that the United States is an exceptional country prevails among most Americans.” “This abiding faith in the free market, the rule of law, equal opportunity, and balanced government has enabled conservatives to construct a narrative that appeals to the American electorate.” Critchlow concludes: “ours is not an age of fracture, but of intellectual confusion on the part of some.” Now, to a certain degree, this avoids Rodgers’s main argument, that the revolution from aggregation to disaggregation occurred in the realm of social thought, not in the realm of politics. But I think it does open up an important point of departure: How fractured is the age when most Americans agree that their nation is exceptional? Does this assume too much?—Do most Americans even think the nation exceptional?

In Rodgers’s concluding remarks, he briefly ponders the question of the American nation. Though he says that his career has long been a search for America, he concedes that “America” cannot be found because “America is an argument: a big, multitudinous, often contradictory amalgam of persons, experiences, aspirations, and dissents.”

---------------------

As an aside, it appears that Rodgers has been tuning into our discussion. He writes: “In the intellectual history blogs and again in this exchange, questions of the casual assumptions behind Age of Fracture have been pressed forward. Which foot moved first? Did the economic transformations of late capitalism set loose these new debates? Or did ideas move first? My response is neither and both.”

Book Review: Schultz On Kimmage's The Conservative Turn

Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). ISBN: 978-0674032583

Kevin Schultz, Assistant Professor
University of Illinois at Chicago
February 2011

There’s a relatively new arrival in the world of twentieth-century American intellectual history (new to me anyway—it’s a 2009 copyright) in the form of Michael Kimmage’s The Conservative Turn, an intellectual biography about the intertwining lives of Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers.

Is there enough intertwining to merit a dual biography? I’m not certain. Does Kimmage make the most of this vehicle to tell an interesting narrative, to take seriously the claims of postwar anti-communism, which all too often suffer the weak and wildly incorrect “they were all horrible McCarthyites” diatribe, to write at times beautifully about the intellectual drives that pulsated through these two stimulating thinkers? Absolutely.

The story of this ebbing friendship begins in Columbia University in the 1920s, when the radical elite was not reading Marx and Engels but Fitzgerald and Proust, was not brazenly political but “disillusioned” and pushing the artistic, not political, edges of Western civilization. This was where Trilling and Chambers met, both of them yearning for bourgeois comforts while hoping to find something more supposedly authentic to sustain their deliberately contrived disillusionment. Thus they each were somewhat uncomfortable in embracing the cultural radicalism of the 1920s. But embrace it they did.

Then the depression happened, and cultural rejections began to take more political forms. In reading about the intellectual life of the 1930s, I am always impressed at the wide-openness of the debates, the seemingly endless possibilities for a politics of the future. The stakes were high, the options limitless, the intellectual horsepower revving right along.

This is colored, of course, by the subsequent thud of a realization that today’s politics seem incredibly narrow. Ours are politically pragmatic times, fueled by calculation and data, with ideas and ideals somehow consigned to being mere tools of an agenda, not causes worthy of a fight. The stakes seem low, the horizon limited, the viciousness present only for the sake of theater, a Kabuki sort of hollow politics. The kids in City College’s famous Alcove One are today almost certainly not debating the possibilities of Trotsky’s vision for America.

There are usually two components to the explanation as to why this apparent narrowing happened. First, the fight against totalitarianism in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s circumscribed both the Right and the Left, as neither Hither nor Stalin seemed like desirable role models — and rightly so. Second, the loss of faith in “the liberal Establishment” following Vietnam, Watergate, and the failures of desegregation made even the seemingly mature commitments of “liberal anticommunism” suspect. After My Lai, who again was in charge of “civilization?”

The first of these transitions — the anti-fascist/anti-communist one — has often come into play as a signifier of “the end of ideology.” But the tale was more complicated than that, something that Kimmage’s book deftly delves into. Both Chambers and Trilling embraced the communist Left in the 1930s, with Chambers famously becoming a Russian spy and Trilling becoming a more dispassionate Fellow Traveler. Trilling’s concern was to redeem Western civilization through culture not politics, and thus his political commitments were almost always relatively soft.

By the late 1930s, both had left their communist sympathies, embracing various forms of anti-communism. Chambers converted from one orthodoxy to another, from Communism to Christianity, while Trilling gave up his soft attachment to Stalin’s communism in order to embrace a fear of all orthodoxies, never becoming much of a fundamentalist in anything. His hopes for a liberal method that could be nurtured and invigorated by passionate outsiders came to fruition briefly during the Kennedy years, but was quickly usurped by the more radical complaints of the New Left and especially the conservative complaints of the New Right, neither of which he found all that appealing.

In the end, both men hardly spoke to one another, not out of disdain but out of a simple lack of overlapping interests. Beyond the basic dislike of communism, they really didn’t share all that much, especially in their visions of America.

That Kimmage is able to tell the story of their intertwining lives with such fine narrative force is certainly to his credit. That he was able to get into the deep roots of these thinkers’ intellectual trajectories is also marvelously done (he’s very good at locating the influences each thinker brought along). Personally, I wish Kimmage had pushed farther in staking his claims, in making a bolder argument about these two very important thinkers, rather than focusing as much on the narrative.

Instead, what we get is “the conservative turn” of the book’s title, by which Kimmage means that the narrowing of the political field led both Trilling and Chambers to fall back on simple anti-communism as the primary focal point of their politics, which led them both to advocate an active role in international politics and both to become, well, “conservative.” This occurred in varying degrees for each of them, with Chambers becoming instrumental in building the conservative forces that held sway in the Republican Party from the 1960s to the 1990s, and Trilling becoming one of the standard bearers for a politics of the anti-communist Left. Well, okay. But Kimmage then follows the traditional but problematic line that Trilling’s anti-communist Left morphed into the neo-cons of the late twentieth century, thus encamping both Chambers and Trilling as somehow “conservative,” although I highly doubt Trilling would accept this formulation. I wish that Kimmage had worked through this argument a bit more, showing more of the possibilities, examining how other causes besides anti-communism (economic equality? urban decay? racism? masscult?) shaped these guys’ politics. I’m not convinced the turn is completely “conservative,” nor that anti-communism was the only spirit that animated them, and this is especially true for Trilling. There seems to be a need for a bolder line between being an anti-communist and being a conservative. Being one doesn’t necessitate being the other. Not all anti-communists were horrible McCarthyites, and Kimmage had a golden opportunity to make it here, which he does, but which then gets swamped by the theme of “the conservative turn.”

That’s really my only complaint. Otherwise, it’s a really enjoyable book. Kimmage locates the psychological, social, and political events that shaped these men’s ideas. Trilling’s secular Jewish upbringing and his parents' love of art and the trappings of the bourgeoisie sent him on a particular centrist course after his dabbling with communism. Chambers’ return to Christianity and his suspicion about the consumerism inherent to modern life were also borne during his early years as a barely middle class youth in rural Long Island. Kimmage then easily follows the trail to Columbia in the 1920s, communism in the 1930s, and anti-communism in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s a good, enlightening book that complicates the picture of postwar anticommunism. It turns out not all anti-communism served on, or even appreciated, HUAC. This is a point many people all too easily forget.

Book Review: Schultz On Kimmage's The Conservative Turn

Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). ISBN: 978-0674032583

Kevin Schultz, Assistant Professor
University of Illinois at Chicago
February 2011

There’s a relatively new arrival in the world of twentieth-century American intellectual history (new to me anyway—it’s a 2009 copyright) in the form of Michael Kimmage’s The Conservative Turn, an intellectual biography about the intertwining lives of Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers.

Is there enough intertwining to merit a dual biography? I’m not certain. Does Kimmage make the most of this vehicle to tell an interesting narrative, to take seriously the claims of postwar anti-communism, which all too often suffer the weak and wildly incorrect “they were all horrible McCarthyites” diatribe, to write at times beautifully about the intellectual drives that pulsated through these two stimulating thinkers? Absolutely.

The story of this ebbing friendship begins in Columbia University in the 1920s, when the radical elite was not reading Marx and Engels but Fitzgerald and Proust, was not brazenly political but “disillusioned” and pushing the artistic, not political, edges of Western civilization. This was where Trilling and Chambers met, both of them yearning for bourgeois comforts while hoping to find something more supposedly authentic to sustain their deliberately contrived disillusionment. Thus they each were somewhat uncomfortable in embracing the cultural radicalism of the 1920s. But embrace it they did.

Then the depression happened, and cultural rejections began to take more political forms. In reading about the intellectual life of the 1930s, I am always impressed at the wide-openness of the debates, the seemingly endless possibilities for a politics of the future. The stakes were high, the options limitless, the intellectual horsepower revving right along.

This is colored, of course, by the subsequent thud of a realization that today’s politics seem incredibly narrow. Ours are politically pragmatic times, fueled by calculation and data, with ideas and ideals somehow consigned to being mere tools of an agenda, not causes worthy of a fight. The stakes seem low, the horizon limited, the viciousness present only for the sake of theater, a Kabuki sort of hollow politics. The kids in City College’s famous Alcove One are today almost certainly not debating the possibilities of Trotsky’s vision for America.

There are usually two components to the explanation as to why this apparent narrowing happened. First, the fight against totalitarianism in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s circumscribed both the Right and the Left, as neither Hither nor Stalin seemed like desirable role models — and rightly so. Second, the loss of faith in “the liberal Establishment” following Vietnam, Watergate, and the failures of desegregation made even the seemingly mature commitments of “liberal anticommunism” suspect. After My Lai, who again was in charge of “civilization?”

The first of these transitions — the anti-fascist/anti-communist one — has often come into play as a signifier of “the end of ideology.” But the tale was more complicated than that, something that Kimmage’s book deftly delves into. Both Chambers and Trilling embraced the communist Left in the 1930s, with Chambers famously becoming a Russian spy and Trilling becoming a more dispassionate Fellow Traveler. Trilling’s concern was to redeem Western civilization through culture not politics, and thus his political commitments were almost always relatively soft.

By the late 1930s, both had left their communist sympathies, embracing various forms of anti-communism. Chambers converted from one orthodoxy to another, from Communism to Christianity, while Trilling gave up his soft attachment to Stalin’s communism in order to embrace a fear of all orthodoxies, never becoming much of a fundamentalist in anything. His hopes for a liberal method that could be nurtured and invigorated by passionate outsiders came to fruition briefly during the Kennedy years, but was quickly usurped by the more radical complaints of the New Left and especially the conservative complaints of the New Right, neither of which he found all that appealing.

In the end, both men hardly spoke to one another, not out of disdain but out of a simple lack of overlapping interests. Beyond the basic dislike of communism, they really didn’t share all that much, especially in their visions of America.

That Kimmage is able to tell the story of their intertwining lives with such fine narrative force is certainly to his credit. That he was able to get into the deep roots of these thinkers’ intellectual trajectories is also marvelously done (he’s very good at locating the influences each thinker brought along). Personally, I wish Kimmage had pushed farther in staking his claims, in making a bolder argument about these two very important thinkers, rather than focusing as much on the narrative.

Instead, what we get is “the conservative turn” of the book’s title, by which Kimmage means that the narrowing of the political field led both Trilling and Chambers to fall back on simple anti-communism as the primary focal point of their politics, which led them both to advocate an active role in international politics and both to become, well, “conservative.” This occurred in varying degrees for each of them, with Chambers becoming instrumental in building the conservative forces that held sway in the Republican Party from the 1960s to the 1990s, and Trilling becoming one of the standard bearers for a politics of the anti-communist Left. Well, okay. But Kimmage then follows the traditional but problematic line that Trilling’s anti-communist Left morphed into the neo-cons of the late twentieth century, thus encamping both Chambers and Trilling as somehow “conservative,” although I highly doubt Trilling would accept this formulation. I wish that Kimmage had worked through this argument a bit more, showing more of the possibilities, examining how other causes besides anti-communism (economic equality? urban decay? racism? masscult?) shaped these guys’ politics. I’m not convinced the turn is completely “conservative,” nor that anti-communism was the only spirit that animated them, and this is especially true for Trilling. There seems to be a need for a bolder line between being an anti-communist and being a conservative. Being one doesn’t necessitate being the other. Not all anti-communists were horrible McCarthyites, and Kimmage had a golden opportunity to make it here, which he does, but which then gets swamped by the theme of “the conservative turn.”

That’s really my only complaint. Otherwise, it’s a really enjoyable book. Kimmage locates the psychological, social, and political events that shaped these men’s ideas. Trilling’s secular Jewish upbringing and his parents' love of art and the trappings of the bourgeoisie sent him on a particular centrist course after his dabbling with communism. Chambers’ return to Christianity and his suspicion about the consumerism inherent to modern life were also borne during his early years as a barely middle class youth in rural Long Island. Kimmage then easily follows the trail to Columbia in the 1920s, communism in the 1930s, and anti-communism in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s a good, enlightening book that complicates the picture of postwar anticommunism. It turns out not all anti-communism served on, or even appreciated, HUAC. This is a point many people all too easily forget.