Dwight Macdonald

Not to be confused withDwight McDonald.

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	Writer author literary critic cultural critic activist
Years active	1929–1980
Political party	Socialist Workers Party(1939–40) Workers' Party(1940–41)
Movement	New York Intellectuals
Spouses	Nancy Rodman ​ ​ (m.1934;div.1954)​ Gloria Lanier ​ (m.1954)​
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 Intellectualsand editor of their leftist magazinePartisan Reviewfor 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.

Early life and career

Macdonald was born on theUpper West SideofNew York Cityto Dwight Macdonald Sr. (–1926) and Alice Hedges Macdonald (–1957),a prosperousProtestantfamily fromBrooklyn.Macdonald was educated at theBarnard School,Phillips Exeter AcademyandYale.At university, he was editor ofThe Yale Record,the student humor magazine.As a student at Yale, he also was a member ofPsi Upsilonand his first job was as a trainee executive forMacy's.

In 1929, Macdonald was employed atTimemagazine; 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.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 Rodmanand credited as the person who "radicalized" him.He is the father of filmmaker and authorNicholas Macdonaldand of Michael Macdonald.

Editor and writer

Macdonald was an editor of thePartisan Reviewmagazine 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.

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 Yorkermagazine, from 1952 to 1962 and was the movie critic forEsquiremagazine. In the 1960s, the quality of his movie-review work forEsquiregranted Macdonald public exposure in the American cultural mainstream as a movie reviewer forThe Today Show,a daytime television talk-show program.

Politics

Macdonald, originally a committedTrotskyist,broke withLeon Trotskyover theKronstadt rebellionwhich Trotsky and theBolshevikshad suppressed in 1921. He then moved towardsdemocratic socialism.He was opposed tototalitarianism,includingfascismandBolshevism,whose defeat he viewed as necessary to the survival of civilization.He denouncedJoseph Stalinfor first encouraging the Poles to launch an anti-Nazi insurrection — theWarsaw Uprising(August–October 1944) — and then halting theRed Armyat the outskirts of Warsaw to allow theGerman Armyto crush the Poles and kill their leaders, communist and noncommunist.

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 increasedfatigueandpsychological depressionas he observed the progressive horrors of the war, especially the commonplace practice of thebombing of civilian populationsand 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 topacifismand tolibertarian socialism.

In that vein, when debating East–West politics with the writerNorman Mailerin 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 blocbecause he regardedBolshevismas the greatest single threat to civilization worldwide in the post-war era.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.In 1955, Macdonald became the associate editor for one year ofEncountermagazine, 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 thatEncountermagazine 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.

Cultural critic

During the late 1950s and the 1960s, Macdonald wrotecultural criticism,especially about the rise ofmass mediaand ofmiddle-browculture, 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.

HisNew Yorkerreview ofWebster's Third Edition,published in 1961, became the definitive review for the dictionary's critics.President Kennedyread 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,which President Johnson adopted after Kennedy's assassination.

InThe New Republicessay "The Browbeater" on 23 November 2011,Franklin Foeraccused 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 forhighbrowsto 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 produceartfor one another, while resolutely ignoring the masses. "

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.

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 intellectualplaced 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 studiesMacdonald was placed among the radical traditions ofthe New York Intellectuals(left-wing anti-Stalinists) and of the MarxistFrankfurt School.

Political radical renewed

As a writer, Macdonald published essays and reviews inThe New Yorkerand inThe New York Review of Books.His most consequential book review forThe New Yorkermagazine was "Our Invisible Poor" (January 1963), aboutThe Other America(1962) byMichael Harrington,a social-history book that reported and documented thesocio-economic inequality and racismexperienced by twenty-five percent of the US population.The social historianMaurice Issermansaid that theWar on Poverty(1964) derived from theJohnson administration's having noticed the sociological report ofThe Other Americaby way of Macdonald's book-review essay.

In opposing theVietnam War(1945–1975), Macdonald defended the constitutional right of American university students to protest thepublic policiesthat facilitated that war in Southeast Asia, thus he supported theColumbia Universitystudents who organized asit-inprotest meant to halt the university's functions.Yet as apolitical radicalhimself in 1968, Macdonald criticized theStudents for a Democratic Society(SDS) organization for insufficient ideological commitment, for showing only thered flagof revolution and not theblack flagofanarchism,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.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.

Anecdotes

Macdonald's outspokenness and volubility gained many detractors. "You have nothing to say, only to add,"Gore Vidaltold him.Leon Trotskyreportedly observed: "Every man has a right to be stupid but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege."Paul Goodmanquipped: "Dwight thinks with his typewriter."

He once notably described his fellow anti-StalinistHeinrich Blücheras a "true, hopeless anarchist.”

Selected works

• Fascism and the American Scene(Pioneer Publishers, 1938).OCLC8949059.
• Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth(New York:The Vanguard Press,1948)
• The Root Is Man: Two Essays in Politics(1953)
• The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions – an Unauthorized Biography(1955)
• The Responsibility of Peoples, and Other Essays in Political Criticism(Westport, Conn.:Greenwood Press,1957).ISBN0837174783.
• Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism(1960)
  • Reprinted asPolitics Past(1970)
• Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm – and After(1960, as editor)
• Albert Camus.Neither Victims nor Executioners(1960, as translator)
• Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture(1962)
• Our Invisible Poor.Sidney Hillman Foundation(1963)
• Poems of Edgar Allan Poe(1965, as editor)
• Dwight Macdonald on Movies(1969)
  • Reprinted asOn Movies(Da Capo Press,1981), with anew introductionbyJohn Simon.
• Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts 1938–1974(1974)
• My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen(1982, as editor)

See also

• James Agee
• William F. Buckley Jr.
• Noam Chomsky
• F. W. Dupee
• Irving Howe

Further reading

• Bloom, Alexander (1986).Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World.New York: Oxford University Press.
• Lewandowski, Tadeusz. (2013).Dwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered.Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
• Sumner, Gregory D. (1996).Dwight Macdonald and thePoliticsCircle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy.
• Whitfield, Stephen J. (1984).A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald.
• Wreszin, Michael (1994).A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight MacDonald.New York:Basic Books.
• Wreszin, Michael. editor (2003).Interviews with Dwight Macdonald.

External links

• Dwight MacdonaldatLibrary of Congress,with 27 library catalog records
• Dwight Macdonald Internet Archive at marxists.org
• Dwight MacdonaldatInternet Archive
• Guide to the Dwight Macdonald Papers,Yale University Library
• Archive ofPoliticsat libcom.org
• Dwight, The Passionate Moralist,byEdward Mendelson,The New York Review of Books,March 8, 2012. Subscription required.
• Stove, R.J.The Man Who Knew Too Much.The American Conservative,December 15, 2003
• Biographical sketch of Dwight MacdonaldbyJohn Elson,Time,April 4, 1994 Volume 143, No. 14 atKenneth A. Rahn, Professor of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island