Dwight Macdonald


Dwight Macdonald was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, philosopher, and political radical. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist magazine Partisan Review for six years. He also contributed to other New York publications including Time, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and politics, a journal which he founded in 1944.

Early life and career

Macdonald was born in New York City to a prosperous Protestant family from Brooklyn and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Yale University. At university, he was editor of The Yale Record, the student humor magazine. As a student at Yale, he also was a member of Psi Upsilon and his first job was as a trainee executive for Macy's.
In 1929, Macdonald was employed at Time magazine; he had been offered a job by Henry Luce, a fellow Yale alumnus. In 1930, he became the associate editor of Fortune, then a new publication created by Luce. Like many writers on Fortune, his politics were radicalized by the Great 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 on U.S. Steel.
In 1934, he married Nancy Gardiner Rodman, sister of Selden Rodman and credited as the person who "radicalized" him. He is the father of filmmaker and author Nicholas Macdonald; and of Michael Macdonald.

Editor and writer

Macdonald was an editor of the Partisan 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 establish Politics, a magazine of more out-spoken and leftist editorial perspective which he published from 1944 to 1949.
As an editor, he fostered intellectuals, such as Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Bruno Bettelheim and C. Wright Mills. Besides his editorial work, he also was a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, from 1952 to 1962 and was the movie critic for Esquire magazine. In the 1960s, the quality of his movie-review work for Esquire granted Macdonald public exposure in the American cultural mainstream as a movie reviewer for The Today Show, a daytime television talk-show program.

Politics

Macdonald, originally a committed Trotskyist, broke with Leon Trotsky over the Kronstadt rebellion which Trotsky and the Bolsheviks had suppressed. He then moved towards democratic socialism. He was opposed to totalitarianism, including fascism and communism, whose defeat he viewed as necessary to the survival of civilization. He denounced Joseph Stalin, for first encouraging the Poles to anti–Nazi insurrection in the Warsaw Uprising and then halting the Red Army at the outskirts of Warsaw to allow the German Army to crush the Poles and kill their leaders, communist and non-communist.
At the same time, Macdonald was critical of the methods that elected, democratic governments used to oppose totalitarianism. In the course of World War II, he suffered from increased fatigue and psychological depression as he observed the progressive horrors of the war, especially the commonplace practice of the bombing of civilian populations and the destruction of entire cities, especially the fire bombing of Dresden and the mistreatment of dehumanized Germans. Hence, by the war's end, Macdonald's politics had progressed to pacifism and to libertarian socialism.
In that vein, in debating East–West politics with the writer Norman Mailer in 1952 Macdonald said that if forced to choose a side, he would choose the West because he opposed Stalinism and Soviet communism as the greatest threats to civilization. In 1953, he publicly re-stated that pro–West political stance in the revised edition of the essay "The Root is Man". Nonetheless, in light of the anticommunist witch-hunts that were McCarthyism he later repudiated such binary politics. In 1955, Macdonald became the associate editor for one year of Encounter magazine, a publication sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was a CIA-funded front organisation meant to ideologically influence and control cultural élites in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Macdonald did not know that Encounter 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.

Cultural critic

During the late 1950s and the 1960s, Macdonald wrote cultural criticism, especially about the rise of mass media and of middle-brow culture, of mediocrity exemplified; the blandly wholesome worldview of the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder, the commodified culture of the Great Books of the Western World and the simplistic language of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible:
His New Yorker reviews of Webster's Third Edition published in 1961 and Michael Harrington's book on poverty in the United States The Other America published in 1962 are perhaps most indicative of the depth and intellectual acuity of his work. His review of Harrington's book was read by President Kennedy and later was seen as a factor in the start of Kennedy's plan for a war on poverty which President Johnson adopted after Kennedy's assassination.
In The New Republic essay "The Browbeater" on 23 November 2011, Franklin Foer accused Macdonald of being a hatchet-man for high culture, going on to say that in his Masscult and Midcult: Against The American Grain a new edition of Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture, Macdonald's cultural criticism "culminated in a plea for highbrows to escape from the mass 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 produce art for one another, while resolutely ignoring the masses".
Likewise, in the book Dwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered Tadeusz Lewandowski argued that Macdonald's approach to cultural questions as a public intellectual placed him in the conservative tradition of the British cultural critic Matthew Arnold, of whom he was the literary heir in the 20th century. Previously, in the field of Cultural Studies Dwight Macdonald was placed among the radical traditions of the New York Intellectuals and of the Marxist Frankfurt School.

Political radical renewed

As a writer, Macdonald published essays and reviews in The New Yorker and in The New York Review of Books. His most consequential book review for The New Yorker magazine was “Our Invisible Poor” about The Other America, by Michael Harrington, a social-history book that reported and documented the socio-economic inequality and racism experienced by twenty-five percent of the U.S. population. The social historian Maurice Isserman said that the War on Poverty derived from the Johnson administration having noticed the sociological report of The Other America by way of Macdonald's book-review essay.
In opposing the Vietnam War, Macdonald defended the constitutional right of American university students to protest the public policies that facilitated that war in Southeast Asia, thus he supported the Columbia University students who organized a sit-in protest meant to halt the university's functions. Yet as a political radical himself in 1968, Macdonald criticized the Students for a Democratic Society organization for insufficient ideological commitment, for showing only the red flag of revolution and not the black flag of anarchism, 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 intellectuals Mitchell Goodman, Henry Braun, Denise Levertov, Noam Chomsky and William Sloane Coffin, Macdonald signed the antiwar manifesto "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" and was a member of RESIST, a non-profit organization for co-ordinating grass-roots political work.

Anecdotes

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".
He once notably described his fellow anti-stalinist Heinrich Blücher as a "true, hopeless anarchist.”

Works