Dwight Macdonald | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 24, 1906 (1906-03-24) New York City, New York, US |
| Died | December 19, 1982(1982-12-19) (aged 76) New York City, New York, US |
| Alma mater | Yale University |
| Occupations |
|
| Years active | 1929–1980 |
| Political party |
|
| Movement | New York Intellectuals |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 2, includingNicholas |
Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was an American writer, critic, philosopher, and activist. Macdonald was a member of theNew York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist magazinePartisan Review for six years. He also contributed to other New York publications includingTime,The New Yorker,The New York Review of Books, andPolitics, a journal which he founded in 1944.
Macdonald was born on theUpper West Side ofNew York City[1] to Dwight Macdonald Sr. (–1926) and Alice Hedges Macdonald (–1957),[2] a prosperousProtestant family fromBrooklyn. Macdonald was educated at theBarnard School,[2]Phillips Exeter Academy andYale.[3] At university, he was editor ofThe Yale Record, the student humor magazine.[4] As a student at Yale, he also was a member ofPsi Upsilon and his first job was as a trainee executive forMacy's.
In 1929, Macdonald was employed atTime magazine; he had been offered a job byHenry Luce, a fellow Yale alumnus. In 1930, he became the associate editor ofFortune, then a new publication created by Luce.[5] Like many writers onFortune, his politics were radicalized by theGreat Depression. He resigned from the magazine in 1936 over an editorial dispute, when the magazine's executives severely edited the last installment of his extended four-part attack onU.S. Steel.
In 1934, he married Nancy Gardiner Rodman (1910–1996), sister ofSelden Rodman and credited as the person who "radicalized" him.[6] He is the father of filmmaker and authorNicholas Macdonald and of Michael Macdonald.[7]
Macdonald was an editor of thePartisan Review magazine from 1937 to 1943, but in the course of editorial disagreements about the degree, the practice, and the principles of political, cultural, and literary criticism, he quit to establishPolitics, a magazine of more outspoken and leftist editorial perspective which he published from 1944 to 1949.[8]
As an editor, he fostered intellectuals (academic and public), such asLionel Trilling,Mary McCarthy,George Orwell,Bruno Bettelheim, andC. Wright Mills. Besides his editorial work, he also was a staff writer forThe New Yorker magazine, from 1952 to 1962 and was the movie critic forEsquire magazine. In the 1960s, the quality of his movie-review work forEsquire granted Macdonald public exposure in the American cultural mainstream as a movie reviewer forThe Today Show, a daytime television talk-show program.[9]
Macdonald, originally a committedTrotskyist, broke withLeon Trotsky over theKronstadt rebellion which Trotsky and theBolsheviks had suppressed in 1921. He then moved towardsdemocratic socialism.[10] He was opposed tototalitarianism, includingfascism andBolshevism, whose defeat he viewed as necessary to the survival of civilization.[11] He denouncedJoseph Stalin for first encouraging the Poles to launch an anti-Nazi insurrection — theWarsaw Uprising (August–October 1944) — and then halting theRed Army at the outskirts of Warsaw to allow theGerman Army to crush the Poles and kill their leaders, communist and noncommunist.[12][13][14][15]
At the same time, Macdonald was fiercely critical of the illiberal policies that elected democratic governments introduced in the name of opposing fascism and Bolshevism. Over the course ofWorld War II (1939–1945), he suffered from increasedfatigue andpsychological depression as he observed the progressive horrors of the war, especially the commonplace practice of thebombing of civilian populations and the destruction of entire cities, in particular thefire bombing of Dresden (February 1945), as well as the mistreatment of German civilians. By the war's end, Macdonald's politics had progressed topacifism and tolibertarian socialism.[12][15][16]
In that vein, when debating East–West politics with the writerNorman Mailer in 1952, Macdonald said that if absolutely forced to choose a side (which he agreed with Mailer was not necessary in most cases but rather only in a limited number), he would reluctantly side with theWestern bloc because he regardedBolshevism as the greatest single threat to civilization worldwide in the post-war era.[16] In 1953, he publicly restated that pro-West political stance in the revised edition of the essay "The Root is Man" (1946). Nonetheless, in light of the anticommunist witch-hunts that wereMcCarthyism (1950–1956), he later repudiated such binary politics.[17][18] In 1955, Macdonald became the associate editor for one year ofEncounter magazine, a publication sponsored by theCongress for Cultural Freedom, which was a CIA-funded front organisation meant to ideologically influence and control cultural elites in theCold War (1945–1991) with the Soviet Union. Macdonald did not know thatEncounter magazine was a CIA front, and when he learned the fact he condemned CIA sponsorship of literary publications and organizations. He had also participated in conferences sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom.[12][19]
During the late 1950s and the 1960s, Macdonald wrotecultural criticism, especially about the rise ofmass media and ofmiddle-brow culture, of mediocrity exemplified; the blandly wholesome worldview of the playOur Town (1938) byThornton Wilder, the commodified culture of theGreat Books of the Western World, and the simplistic language of theRevised Standard Version (1966) of the Bible:
To make the Bible readable in the modern sense means to flatten out, tone down, and convert into tepid expository prose what in [the King James Version] is wild, full of awe, poetic, and passionate. It means stepping down the voltage of the K.J.V. so that it won’t blow any fuses. Babes and sucklings (or infants) can play with the R.S.V. without the slightest danger of electrocution.[20]
HisNew Yorker review ofWebster's Third Edition, published in 1961, became the definitive review for the dictionary's critics.[21]President Kennedy read Macdonald's review ofMichael Harrington's book onpoverty in the United States,The Other America, as a major factor in the start of Kennedy's plan for a war on poverty,[22] which President Johnson adopted after Kennedy's assassination.[23]
InThe New Republic essay "The Browbeater" on 23 November 2011,Franklin Foer accused Macdonald of being a hatchet-man forhigh culture, going on to say that in hisMasscult and Midcult: Against The American Grain (2011), a new edition ofAgainst the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962), Macdonald's cultural criticism "culminated in a plea forhighbrows to escape from themass culture" that dominates the mainstream of American society. Macdonald, Foer suggests, would welcome a time when "highbrows would flee to their own hermetic little world, where they could produceart for one another, while resolutely ignoring the masses."[24]
Cultural critic and historianLouis Menand, writing inThe New Yorker, argued that "Macdonald was not a prude. He was not in the business of blaming people for enjoying what they enjoyed or admiring what they admired. His business was getting people to realize that they were often not actually enjoying or benefitting from the cultural goods they had been persuaded to patronize," those cultural goods being what Macdonald labeled "Midcult"—ostensibly "sophisticated" cultural products intended for mass consumption.[25]
In the bookDwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered (2013), Tadeusz Lewandowski argued that Macdonald's approach to cultural questions as apublic intellectual placed him in the conservative tradition of the British cultural criticMatthew Arnold, of whom he was the literary heir in the 20th century. Previously, in the field ofcultural studies Macdonald was placed among the radical traditions ofthe New York Intellectuals (left-wing anti-Stalinists) and of the MarxistFrankfurt School.[26]
As a writer, Macdonald published essays and reviews inThe New Yorker and inThe New York Review of Books. His most consequential book review forThe New Yorker magazine was "Our Invisible Poor" (January 1963), aboutThe Other America (1962) byMichael Harrington, a social-history book that reported and documented thesocio-economic inequality and racism experienced by twenty-five percent of the US population.[27] The social historianMaurice Isserman said that theWar on Poverty (1964) derived from theJohnson administration's having noticed the sociological report ofThe Other America by way of Macdonald's book-review essay.[28]
In opposing theVietnam War (1945–1975), Macdonald defended the constitutional right of American university students to protest thepublic policies that facilitated that war in Southeast Asia, thus he supported theColumbia University students who organized asit-in protest meant to halt the university's functions.[11] Yet as apolitical radical himself in 1968, Macdonald criticized theStudents for a Democratic Society (SDS) organization for insufficient ideological commitment, for showing only thered flag of revolution and not theblack flag ofanarchism, his political taste.
In further action upon his political principles, Macdonald signed his name to the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" by which he refused to pay income tax to undermine the financing of the undeclared Vietnam War.[29] Likewise, along with the American public intellectualsMitchell Goodman,Henry Braun,Denise Levertov,Noam Chomsky, andWilliam Sloane Coffin, Macdonald signed the antiwar manifesto "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" (12 October 1967) and was a member ofRESIST, a non-profit organization for coordinating grass-roots political work.[30]
Macdonald's outspokenness and volubility gained many detractors. "You have nothing to say, only to add,"Gore Vidal told him.Leon Trotsky reportedly observed: "Every man has a right to be stupid but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege."Paul Goodman quipped: "Dwight thinks with his typewriter."[31]
He once notably described his fellow anti-StalinistHeinrich Blücher as a "true, hopeless anarchist.”[32]
