Where Does it Come From?

Where does it come from, this Orange Man hate? Let me give you the map and we'll see if it can help you find your way out of the woods. (Unless of course, as far as you're concerned, you aren't in the woods or at least don't need to follow my directions, thanks anyway). I'm calling my map The Hatred of Capitalism Map, and the woods are the Twentieth Century.

   
We'll start with the First World War, which happened to more or less occur in tandem with the Russian Revolution, (The Bolshevik Revolution), and which soon began paying for revolution to spread around the globe. 

On my personal odyssey I started with Edmund Wilson's To The Finland Station, which gave me, and I hope will do the same for you, a primer for a crash course in 20th Century misery.   

Next, I ask you to rent the movie Reds, produced and directed by the sexiest man in the world, that inveterate red diaper baby Warren Beatty. Beatty learned everything he knows about politics, we are told, from that favorite of the original Hollywood Old Left, Lillian Hellman. Just Google Lillian Hellman, Warren Beatty, and you'll get the rundown, albeit from Google's editorially leftist slant. The movie, as biased as it is, will give you as good a picture of the period between the two World Wars as any random pile of associated novels. The key to understanding the movie though, and not through Warren's baby blues, is in the intermission part of the movie where some of the real personae from the period make cameo appearances. Focus on Henry Miller. Miller's short speech identifies a major shortcoming of 20th century American intellectuals. For some reason, H.M. never seemed to suffer from social anxiety, so he was able to sit there in the middle of this multi-million dollar Hollywood spectacular, probably coming from his shack on the Big Sur, and call a spade a spade, saving us willing and open minded souls who sprung for the movie ticket years of pointless and unnecessary exposure to toxicity. See the movie and see if Miller's thinking jumps out at you.  

Now, since we didn't live through that between-the-wars period, if we did we would be pushing 100, and we remember trying to get people to tell us what it was like, what with all the muddled near- religious piety of our liberal elders toward the superhero of that period, FDR;  let us thank the God that made us for Amity Shlaes's brilliant history of the period, The Forgotten Man. This book is indispensable. It even comes in a graphic edition, which is beautiful, but for me, since I wasn't alive then and was not a student of the period, I needed to read the print version first, slowly, looking up stuff as I went along. I'm so glad I did.    


The New York Intellectuals were the quarterbacks for the Mid-Century Left in The U.S., and I've done a bit of reading about them. I find them fascinating, both from having been raised by parents who took them very seriously, and also because we lived in a part of the country where these writers, poets and critics tended to congregate.  I can enjoy reading about people who are far to the left of where I am today, probably because I would, most likely, as an intelligent human being, have been with them, if I were there contemporaries. (We are affected by our times.)   
I've mentioned some of these books. Let me say that Truants, by William Barrett, is a favorite. (I think you gain a great deal if you take advantage of exposing yourself to the better writers first before you continue into the weeds). Another one that I enjoyed is Lionel Abel's Intellectual Follies.  

But, before I would force on anyone a trip down memory lane with a dozen or more Commies, Fellow Travelers, and former Reds from the thirties, forties and fifties, I will save you a lot of time and dare you to wade into a long and meaty biography of one of the most important people over the  great spread of the history about which I speak. And that is A Rebel In Defense of Tradition; The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, by Michael Wreszin. 


Growing up in East Hampton, NY, in the Fifties I heard my parents and their friends talk about the writers and artists that they knew. I knew who they were talking about when they referred to Bill, Jackson, Harold, Clem, and and many others, but I was older, probable early teens, when I started to notice the name Dwight, which I thought was a cool name. (Dwight Yokum probably wasn't born yet), I can't tell you when I put a face to the name, it was years after I first heard it.  I remember my mother pointing out to me the house that he either owned or rented during the summer. It was near a regular route that I took on horseback. (From twelve to seventeen I owned a nice backyard horse that I rode all over town in those much less populated times in that now overcrowded beehive of striving activity). I remember that on quite a few occasions I rode through his property as part of a short cut to a large section of woods owned by my equestrian mentor, Roy.  

Many years later, I was still living in my home town, and dating a woman who was an editor in NYC.  Through her I met a couple who were visiting from Europe. They had come here primarily to meet with Dwight. They were Americans but had lived in Italy for years and were involved with the Italian Communist Party.  I never got to cross-examine them, wasn't inclined to, but they made me aware of the intellectual canon of European Communism. 
Twenty years before I met that couple, who I won't name, I had learned from a couple of magazine articles about the CIA's* participation in the American Left, mostly through something called The Congress on Cultural Freedom, and that information had been festering in my mind, and causing me to re-hash my ideas about the culture I was raised in.  I wrote about those articles in my book The White Fence, and have posted it to this blog, right next door, under the title A Piece of my Take on Communism. All the information comes from the assigned magazines and nothing of it comes off the top of my head.   

In his bio of Macdonald, Michael Wreszin says that Macdonald claimed not to know that the Congress was a front for the CIA, until he read it in the papers in 1967. There isn't any reason to doubt him about that, as far as I can tell. Dwight and his first wife Nancy had heard rumors that the CCF was "sponsored by the State Department", but Dwight gave no indication that he accepted the validity of that information. Wreszin goes on to say, "In any event, he had no fundamental disagreement with the politics of the CCF."

At any rate, as a result of meeting the aforementioned couple, I began delving into the whole Communism for Western Civilization thing. I also learned why, when I was drafted into the Army, in 1964, I was questioned by in intelligence officer as to the why and wherefore of my brief attendance at The New School for Social Research, in NYC.  I had no idea then or for years later about the Genesis of The New School. As it turned out, The New School was the new home of the Frankfurt School in 1935, when its scholars were forced to vacate after Hitler came into power.   


The following is from a contemporary website put out by The New School:

The New School for Social Research (NSSR) is a graduate institution in the heart of New York City. It generates progressive scholarship and historically grounded education in the social sciences and philosophy. With more than 75 full-time faculty members, its ten departments and programs offer masters and doctoral degrees to 800 graduate students from 70 countries. Interdisciplinary centers and institutes housed at The New School for Social Research provide further opportunities for deep inquiry and innovative collaborations, particularly at the intersection of social theory, policy, and design.

Social Theory is the key term.

 
The following is out of Wikipedia: 

The philosophical tradition of the Frankfurt School — the multi-disciplinary integration of the social sciences — is associated with the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who became the director in 1930, and recruited intellectuals such as Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist), Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst), and Herbert Marcuse (philosopher).

My personal point of view, which I intend to delve into in further blog posts, is that as time went on, broadly speaking, the Anti-Stalinist Left and the Stalinist Left, and the Mao-ist Left, and other permutations have co-mingled and co-mingled again and continued to gain traction with what became the Obama-Clinton American Democratic Party. 

 

(I will have more to say about Dwight Macdonald in the future.) 

 

 

*For great insight into the CIA, read The Mighty Wurlitzer; How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford.  Harvard University Press, 2008.