Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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Canons of Dissent: Anarchy, the "Cold War" Canon, and the Anti-Statist Left in the United States / James Patrick Brown
Abstract: This paper examines and questions two dominant narratives about the role of literary leftist intellectuals in the United States following World War II: the New Americanist "paradigm" and the corrective account of Old Left intellectuals that draws attention to the communist commitments of core public intellectuals whose cultural work had a lasting, progressive impact on American life. In order to critique both these versions of American leftist intellectual history, the United States' long tradition of anarchist dissent is re-established. Tracing out its submerged anarchism and anti-state themes, alternative political tendencies in literature and scholarship are identified as central to resisting Cold War conformity.
<1> This paper will examine and question two dominant narratives about the role of literary leftist intellectuals in the United States following World War II. In the first narrative - that offered by scholars working within what has been broadly called the New Americanist "paradigm" - the Old Left intellectual workers of inter-and post-War America formulated a canon of American literature and thought that would incidentally underwrite a post-War liberal consensus. This consensus, in the New Americanist point of view, was oriented toward masculine, individualistic values capable of bolstering the United States' market and military hegemony. In this oversimplified, highly problematic account, intellectuals who founded American Studies are responsible for justifying the Vietnam War, for instance, in the realm of ideology. Michael Denning and Alan Wald, by contrast, offer a corrective account of Old Left intellectuals that draws attention to the communist commitments of core public intellectuals whose cultural work had a lasting, progressive impact on American life. Their work links the New Left with the Old in ways that rise above the generational conflict perpetuated by the New Americanists. In both of these versions of American leftist intellectual history, however, a major thread of thought has been overlooked: the United States' long tradition of anarchist dissent.
<2> In entering into conversation with these two important and, I argue, competing narratives, I suggest that the Left's over-determined tendency to employ Marxist formations to read American intellectual history limits our understandings of Cold War and Vietnam War-era radicalisms. Specifically, Denning and Wald's focus on Communist radicalism leads to a problematic dismissal of the historically dominant, anti-statist, individualistic strain of American left dissent movements. In this dismissal, an entire decade - the 1950s - is rendered silent. By concluding this essay with some alternative, anarchist-centric visions of the American left offered by anarchist public intellectuals and activists, I hope both to encourage further research into America's anti-statist left and to help further the work on the American Left that Denning, Wald, and others have carried forward.
New Americanists and the Cultural Front Corrective
<3> In "National Narratives, Postnational Narrative," Donald Pease offers a clean summation of the New Americanist reevaluation of the American Cold War canon. Pease's position, against which Denning and Wald's accounts may be fruitfully juxtaposed, holds that public intellectuals and literary critics of the early twentieth century were responsible for underwriting the horrors of American post-war geo-politics. According to Pease, "Americanist policies of neocolonialism and cultural imperialism abroad and liberal anticommunism at home" gained support from "the literary critics who instituted" what Pease calls "the cold war canon." The literary critics to whom Pease refers supported American hegemony by creating a canon that codified a "literary genre whose socially symbolic action entailed the production of [the Cold War] political unconscious." This genre, the "Americanist romance," celebrated the exceptionalist national mythology of "a people's successful overthrow of a tyrannical foreign power." The political authority of this American exceptionalism was, according to Pease, "derived from its capacity to displace entire cultures with ritual reenactments of this mythos" (17-18).
<4> In other words, by selecting a canon that contained authors like Emerson and Thoreau, critics like F.O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance essentially codified post-war literary studies in the United States, aided American power by encouraging individuals and groups overseas to rebel against Communist "tyrants," a critical move that would help the United States by encouraging insurrection in countries of strategic interest to American power. Thus, Pease concludes, critics in the years leading up to and during the cold war, without meaning to, expressed the "political unconscious of official literary history: the codes and assumptions informing the structures of exclusion whereby the Reason of State had secured its identification with the mythology" of individual liberty "underwriting the national canon." In Pease's view, therefore, "F. O. Matthiessen, R. W. B. Lewis, Henry Nash Smith, Richard Chase, [and] Perry Miller" - all key cold war era critics - "might be understood as responsible for rendering this unconscious political" (15). Indeed, the United States' global policy, Pease notes, "depended for its coherence" on their scholarship (18). Paul Giles has argued, along similar lines, that "F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Chase and others," in their "critical recapitulation of a transcendental ethic of higher freedom," were "implicitly endorsing a patriotic version of liberty that became institutionally equated with the idea of America itself" and that supported a "rhetorical anti-Marxism" typical of "American studies during these years" (526).
<5> Without question, understanding the influence of nationalist policies on these prominent literary critics should serve to uncover unconscious political ideologies contained in their criticism. However, the notion of the political unconscious as Pease, Giles, and other New Americanists employ it to support their arguments raises important questions about the relationship between the individual and the historical moment in which an individual lives and moves. If, for instance, the hegemonic political consciousness of the Cold War was ardently and publicly bent on dominating the globe, why would a critic need to sublimate this agenda? Does an obvious, broadly supported, dominant mode of seeing the world need to disguise itself in the political unconscious of belles lettres? What other messages, besides the dominant ones, might be derived from their choices of representative American authors? We can reframe this question from an anarchist perspective: Is individualism necessarily connected to the power of state, as New Americanists argue, or might individualism serve counter-hegemonic purposes?
<6> New Americanists argue that the individualist canon of American literature - with its Henry David Thoreaus and Ralph Waldo Emersons - bolstered the cause of cold war liberalism not just by fomenting political unrest abroad but by undermining collective action and revalorizing the bourgeois self. According to Cecelia Tichi, summarizing trends in New Americanist analysis of American literature for the MLA's "paradigm shifting" 1992 volume Redrawing the Boundaries, a primary enemy of the New Americanist critique should be "the masculine ethos of individualism," an ideology that, "beginning in the 1970's," was challenged on the grounds that "American individualism [is] hostile to human interests and pernicious in its effects." Individualism was properly to be viewed as "egocentric narcissism," as endorsing "violence against the self and others," and as exemplifying the cold war's "democratic common person, recommitting himself to American traditions of hard work and artisanship" (221-22). Without explaining what objection a writer could possibly have to committed artisanship, Tichi's summary neatly captures the Marxist assumption behind New Americanist criticism: the individual agent, an impediment to political progress, is dead; or, if not yet, it should be.
<7> The primary problem with consensus history as presented by the theoretical maneuvers New Americanist historians perform - as Cornel West, for example, has noted - lies in the "bizarre contrast between the implicit call for a politically charged hermeneutic and the assumption that individual persons are incapable of resisting hegemonic structures" (189). The state, which all but controls the contents of the political unconscious, must always win. If, as Frederic Jameson has written, "history is what hurts" (102), then agency is entirely removed from the realm of human action. Though Jameson's view of the relation between literary texts and their historical moments appears at times more complex than this aphorism suggests - he also argues that the "historical situation of the text . . . is not construed as causal (however that might be imagined) but rather as one of a limiting situation" (148) - the core assumption of New Americanist criticism (that the Cold War canon reflected Cold War values) derives from an application of Jameson's The Political Unconscious to American literary and political history. In this application, history, not individuals, determines the subjectivities and cultural productions of all historical actors. This is precisely where anarchist and Marxist conceptions of history part ways. Anarchist activists and intellectuals object strongly to Marx's view, which Marx himself, like Jameson, complicates, that "[t]he mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not," Marx famously wrote in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness" (263). Against this proposition, Mikhail Bakunin, Marx's intellectual rival in the First International Workingmen's Association, wrote that on the contrary, "The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature, because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual" (30).
<8> Anarchism's affirmation of individual choice and personal will has both political and theoretical outcomes. Politically, anarchists object to Marxism because they believe that if individuals are determined foremost by social and historical circumstances, then it must follow that they cannot be free until someone or some group able to see above such circumstances liberates the vast majority by re-mastering the economy in the name of the working person. The vehicle of this reform must inevitably be some state structure powerful enough to liberate humanity from its false consciousness. Anarchists argue that regardless of such benevolent intentions, the state and those who offer or demand to take its reins are inherently suspect and that revolution should aim to free the individual state itself, in any of its guises. Further, the best way to accomplish this goal is for individuals to immediately begin governing their own affairs and taking the reins of the means of production. Unlike "conservative," "classically liberal," or libertarian thinkers, anarchists hold that a limited state arranged to protect the private property of stakeholders risks becoming as tyrannical as a state arranged to forcibly redistribute this property.
<9> Although, as we shall see, Denning's account of the cultural front dismisses anarchism generally, The Cultural Front stands as a corrective to New Americanist narratives about the role of cultural producers because it allows the individual intentions of world war-era radical critics to matter. It assumes that their wills were capable of shaping, and in fact did shape, history. It stands as a corrective, in other words, to a dominant narrative about twentieth century American cultural production. In this narrative, the left wing intellectuals of the 1930s and 40s adopted a form of socialist patriotism best summarized in the Communist Party USA's phrase "Communism is Twentieth century Americanism." Eventually, as America survived the Second World War and entered an age of prosperity, erstwhile Popular Front radicals became liberal intellectuals extolling American exceptionalism and touting the virtues of the Keynesian market economy. This narrative account - recorded, for example, in Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left and Richard Pells' The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age - has become so common as to constitute its own genre: The Complicity Cycle. This genre, mixed with Marxist anti-individualism, sits behind New Americanist narratology, relying on what Andrew Hunt has called the "historical amnesia" (150) of the New Left's self-valorizing exceptionalism, one that treats both the Old Left and the entire decade of the 1950s as hopelessly lost to really radical awakening. In popular culture, this narrative appears in such films as Pleasantville, where the entire 1950s is filmed in a conservative, politically repressive black and white finally broken in the 1960s by the advent of a new sexual politics ushered in by, of all things, the advent of color television.
<10> In fact, while Denning calls attention to the radical intentions and outcomes of cultural workers on the left in 30s and 40s and thus provides a corrective account of those decades, he repeats the New Leftist assumption that a pause in radical thought did haunt the decade between the Old and New Lefts. According to Denning, his decision to write The Cultural Front was influenced by his suspicion that "cold war repression had left a cultural amnesia" (xi) about interwar leftist critics and creators, and this resulted from the repressive intellectual climate of the 1950s. In his view, "the Popular Front was defeated by the forces of the 'American Century,' and the 'thirties' seemed to be over by 1948." Even though "the works of the cultural front had a profound impact on American culture" (xx) in some circles into the 1950s, for Denning, the "defeat of the Popular Front social movement in the Cold War years" of the 1950s meant "the defeat of US social democracy" itself (11). While the repression of both progressive and Marxist thought in the 1950s, represented by but certainly not limited to McCarthy's working class populism, has left undeniable scars on the American historical landscape and affected thousands of lives, as Ellen Schrecker has painstakingly documented, Denning's contention that the 1950s killed social democracy bears further examination.
<11> Denning's stereotyped treatment of the 1950s results from the very touchstone by which he tests individuals' leftist credentials. The cultural front was formed and conceptualized, he argues, "by a number of intellectuals who make up the tradition that has come to be known as Western Marxism" (97). Though Denning locates contention, intellectual difference, and diverse claims and means within the popular front, when Marxism - and socialism and communism - came under attack in the age of McCarthy, the Front was inevitably, if only temporarily, defeated. This Western Marxist socialism and communism, as Denning relates the story, revived in the 1960s and began to fulfill the Front's original promise once again. Thus, the story of the Popular Front really has two ends. First, it "ends" in "the early 1960s when the 'New Left appears'" and it "ends" with the continued contributions of Old Left figures to the 1960s (26). If the Marxist tradition failed to sufficiently vivify the left in the 1950s, Denning argues, this could not have been the result of any failure on the part of Western Marxism or the Popular Front to attract Americans. Rather, this destruction of Marxism in America could only have happened because "it was the right-wing attack on this movement culture that destroyed it" (77).
<12> While Denning locates nuance within the Popular Front, his equation of the left with a continuum of Western Marxism leads to an unnecessarily fatalistic view of the 1950s, and the problems with Denning's decision to define the American left as primarily Marxist-inflected are multiple. To begin with, the left in America, like the left everywhere else in the world, predates Marx, and many writers on the pre-Marxist left had an indelible impact on Marx himself. The genius of Denning's work on leftist intellectuals is that he allows us to see thinkers unnecessarily and a-historically posed in conflict by the New Left and New Americanists - F.O. Matthiessen, Leo Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, and C.L.R. James, for instance - as cooperatively engaged in a unified, if not uniform, left wing project. On the other hand, not all of these intellectuals derived their dissenting stances from Marx or Communism, and some - such as Leo Marx and F.O. Matthiessen - sought roots for American radicalism in the pre-Marxist American literary tradition. This brand of dissent actually dominated the leftism of the 1950s and generated an extremely active and vibrant movement represented by the Beats. Before discussing such non-Marxist left formations, however, we will compare Denning's version of F.O. Matthiessen, the writer most responsible for creating the "Cold War canon," to Matthiessen's own statements about his relationships to the Communist Party and Marxist theory. This will explain why nuanced distinctions among left wing radicalisms (even more than those Denning draws out) are important for understanding American literary, intellectual, and political history.
The Agony of F.O. Matthiessen
<13> F.O. Matthiessen, who after Vernon Louis Parrington is considered an originator of the field of American Studies, has suffered the primary brunt of the New Left amnesia, as evidenced by his perpetual appearance in New Left criticism of "the cold war canon" as first in the list of offending authors. However, F.O. Matthiessen was - whatever faults the New Left may wish to ascribe to his particular American canon - a paradigmatic political dissenter of the Old Left, as Denning and others have noted. Absurdly, in the very same Redrawing the Boundaries volume in which Cecelia Tichi argued that New Americanists should attack Matthiessen's complicitous individualism, Walter Cohen writes that "Matthiessen was significantly influenced by Marxism" (330-331), as were numerous interwar scholars, and that he was thus among the repressed political voices of his age. Unlike his fellow travelers, who began defecting from the Communist party as government persecution heated, Matthiessen, Marjorie Perloff writes, remained "a convinced Marxist" (156) until his death by suicide in 1950. Matthiessen himself, however, tells a different story. The stark suicide note he left behind him on March 31, 1950 after leaping to his death from the 12th floor window of a Boston hotel, as reported in a Harvard Crimson article starkly titled "F. O. Matthiessen Plunges to Death from Hotel Window," suggests his profound disappointment with the direction of the cold war world order and names the political camp in which he saw himself as belonging:
I am depressed over world conditions. I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective. I would like to be buried by the side of my mother in Springfield, Massachusetts.
As if in posthumous defiance of critics trying to revive his Marxist image, Matthiessen's dying words - coupled with his public testimony while teaching at Harvard - tell us that his models for political action were Christ and socialism, not Marx and Communism.
<14> In his account of Matthiessen's place both in the cultural front and in founding the discipline of American Studies, Denning writes that "the Popular Front generation was epitomized by Matthiessen" (77). It seems odd, then, that Denning devoted little attention to Matthiessen or his canon's influence on the cultural front. The purpose of Denning's approach to Matthiessen, though, is not to let him epitomize an entire movement, but to show how his work on Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman was usurped by that ubiquitous villain: the 1950s. In Denning's words, even the "critical American Studies of the post-war years" that Matthiessen helped to found "was scarred by the intellectual repression of the cold war" (446). Though Denning argues that New Americanist critics of Matthiessen have projected the cultural conservatism of the cold war backwards on to Matthiessen himself, he still accepts that the 1950s successfully usurped and constrained American Studies and its canons. In contrast, one could argue that Matthiessen's greatest contribution to the cultural front, and later to the New Left, was the formulation of an American canon that forwarded radically individualistic, anti-statist assumptions and critiques throughout the 1950s in spite of official repression from reactionary quarters.
<15> Indeed, in many ways the cold war state and the "masculine" ethos of individualism supposed to have been enshrined in Matthiessen's canon were at odds with each other. One looks long and hard for instances of the state actually citing Matthiessen's literary canon in support of itself and its interests. Instead, what one finds is a suppression of the messages in writers like Thoreau precisely because they did not underwrite the national cause. Perhaps the most significant statement on the social value of Matthiessen's canon occurred after his death, when, in the mid-1950s, according to the Thoreau scholar Walter Harding,
[t]he United States Information Service included . . . in all their libraries around the world a textbook of American literature which reprinted Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" [that] the late Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin succeeded in having removed from the shelves of each of those libraries - specifically because of the Thoreau essay. (336)
Had the United States Information Service, that bastion of U.S. cold war global-cultural strategy, referred to Matthiessen's work when selecting their representative American texts, it might have excluded Thoreau from its anthology in the first place. In Matthiessen's words, the most fruitful way to read Thoreau
would be to relate Thoreau to the background of native American Anarchism . . . For, in order to understand the context of Thoreau's radicalism, it is necessary to know the exact forces against which he was protesting. In briefest form, these were the narrow standards of a society dominated by mercantilism. (336)
Thus, the most important aspect of one of the core writers in Matthiessen's literary canon was not his Communism but his individualist anarchist protest against the same narrow, capital-dominated culture that Matthiessen opposed. In writing Thoreau into his American Renaissance Matthiessen, in his own view at least, was canonizing American anarchism, not orthodox Communism or Marxism.
<16> In practice, Matthiessen's relationship with the Popular Front was conflicted. For this reason, he could only stand as the epitome of the cultural front if members of the movement in general resisted the orthodoxies of Marxism and Communism while remaining out of step with the American Communist party, as Matthiessen was. In other words, he was only typical of the cultural front if his entire cohort was a-typical, which of course undermines the very basis for grouping them as a movement under the umbrella term Western Marxism. Although at first glance, F.O. Matthiessen's left wing resume would seem to solidify his Popular Front Communism, his divergence from the movement appears evident when one considers his political aesthetics, or what Denning might call his "canons of value."
<17> In 1943, the FBI opened an investigation into Matthiessen's "Communist front group" activities. The resulting FBI file runs fourteen pages long and spans the years 1943-1947. In the language of the FBI, Massachusetts and Harvard, where Matthiessen taught, are transformed into "the Eastern Defense Command Area," while Matthiessen becomes, literally, the "Subject" who is, throughout the FBI's investigation, "considered for removal." An inventory of the various affinity groups to which Matthiessen belonged constitutes most of the FBI's report. What appears to have piqued the FBI's interest in documenting Matthiessen's life, the first of the "subversive" activities appearing in the file, was his leadership as president of the Harvard Teachers Union and his public advocacy on behalf of Harry Bridges, the San Francisco longshoremen's labor leader and International Longshoremen's and Warehouse Union (ILWU) founder, then on trial by the United States government and under the threat of deportation. Matthiessen sponsored the National Conference for Democracy and Education in 1941, advocating "the right to free speech as the truth, and secondly, the right to free criticism." He appeared not only as a member of the Massachusetts Chapter of the ACLU but also as President of the Cambridge chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL. He was "listed in the Souvenir Journal of the 6th National Conference of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born." His public lectures were considered equally suspect. He was "listed on a handbill issued by the John Reed Club of Boston as a speaker" alongside National Communist Party chairman William Z. Foster. "The Subject was scheduled to speak on Lincoln and the Common Man" under the "auspices of the Progressive Bookshop, 8 Beaver Street, Boston" on "February 26, 1943." In 1947, Matthiessen was Massachusetts vice chairman of the Progressive Citizens of America. The same year, he "alleged that there was widespread discrimination among colleges in admitting students based upon religious and racial prejudice" and "advocated a form of Socialism in education" to correct the problem. In brief, the "Subject was suspected" by the FBI "of Communist Party Membership and active in numerous undertakings sponsored by the Party." All the while, the FBI noted, he "continues to be Professor of Literature at Harvard University" (Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Subject: F.O. Matthiessen).
<18> From the point of view of the State, Matthiessen was a "security matter" and his political praxis represented a threat to the dominant national agenda. However, Matthiessen also fell out of favor with his allies in the progressive, socialist, and Communist movement after writing his 1948 From the Heart of Europe, a book which praised European Communism long after it was fashionable to do so even on the Popular Front left. Indeed, his sense of abandonment from his cohort - in addition to the death of his lover Russell Cheney a few years earlier and his harassment by the House un-American Activities Committee - helps to explain the depression that led to his suicide. Matthiessen, in other words, whose death shocked his liberal and ex-radical friends and garnered national attention, died outside the embrace of the cultural front, much of which had by 1950 migrated toward a liberal consensus, as its critics on the New Left have emphasized. In this sense at least, his story was quite exceptional.
<19> Equally exceptional was Matthiessen's sense of the social value of literature. Much of what we know about Matthiessen's ideas on the relationship between literature and politics comes from sources outside American Renaissance, his most influential book. Harvard students, according to the Harvard Crimson feature "Portraits of Harvard Figures," remarked throughout his career on the degree of pedagogical and political difference that Matthiessen apparently exhibited in comparison with his fellow faculty. According to one student, writing for the Crimson early in Matthiessen's Harvard career,
Those sophomores and juniors who gather twice weekly in [Matthiessen's courses] are soon aware that here definitely is not the usual experience of being lectured to. . . . Those who know what most lecturers could do to revolutionary ballads are grateful. His method in any of his courses . . . seems to be what it is by virtue of his realization that books should be a criticism of life. Most of the Harvard faculty seem to go on the working assumption that life is the criticism of books.
The notion that books should be a criticism of life was ubiquitous across the literary wing of the cultural front, and Matthiessen's apparently moving use of revolutionary ballads in the classroom points to an interest in working class forms he also shared with his cohort on the left. However, Matthiessen's personal canon, which became very public during the cold war years, was decidedly high brow, and Matthiessen outright rejected the social value of agitprop, or agitation propaganda, so central to the Popular Front's search for a working-class idiom. In so doing, he offered a theory of literature more parallel to that of the anarchist of the previous generation, Emma Goldman, than that of the New Masses, which specifically sought propaganda marked by "working class" authenticity and Communist sensibility.
<20> In a 1947 lecture for the John Reed Club on "The Artist and Society," Matthiessen distinguished his views from orthodox Marxism while stating his adoption of what he considered to be core concepts of Marxist aesthetics: "I am a Socialist and a Christian, not a Marxist, but I've learned much from Marxism," Matthiessen said, in a statement that was duly recorded by the FBI in his file. What Matthiessen learned from Marxism was that art was "a weapon and reflection of society" (Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Subject: F.O. Matthiessen). According to the Harvard Crimson article reporting on this lecture the day after it was delivered,
Professor Matthiessen stressed the two Marxist concepts of "art as a reflection of society" and "art as a weapon," pointing out that to Marx and Engels the great artist is the man who can "give the fullest picture of the reality of his time, not a future historical solution of the basic conflict he is describing." ("Matthiessen Lectures On Marxist Concepts Of Artist in Society")
For Matthiessen, as for Emma Goldman, the functions of art and criticism were fundamentally social. However, both also held that aesthetic value was a more important factor in literature as social protest than propagandistic aims. In Matthiessen's view, social art was distinguishable from "stupid" works of propaganda on the ground that art was capable of producing "a true and realistic glimpse of society" rather than a merely ideological one. Propaganda, Matthiessen held, was "deplorable," as it was for Goldman, who thought that "since art speaks a language of its own, a language embracing the entire gamut of human emotions, it often sounds meaningless to those whose hearing has been dulled by the din of stereotyped phrases." In Goldman's words, art is "the dynamite which undermines superstition, shakes the social pillars, and prepares men and women for the reconstruction (The Social Significance of the Modern Drama).
<21> Like Matthiessen, Goldman refused to elevate propaganda over aesthetics. Her sense that propaganda dulled the nuanced thought necessary for social reconstruction led her to form an American canon that would overlap with Matthiessen's. Nodding to two cornerstones of Matthiessen's canon, Goldman argued that artists like Emerson and Whitman, and "a host of others mirror in their work as much of the spiritual and social revolt as is expressed by the most fiery speech of the propagandist" (The Social Significance of the Modern Drama). Aesthetic value, for both of these thinkers, was corollary to radical political goals, but achieving radical goals required undermining the stereotypes proffered by all propaganda and replacing them with nuanced worldviews that only art could offer, views that would encourage readers to question any political orthodoxy, whether democratic-capitalist or Communist. Where propaganda stultified the individual, literature was liberating, freeing the individual from the straightjacket of conformity that propaganda of any kind enforced. In this way, Goldman and Matthiessen, with their differing commitments - one anarchist one Christian socialist - believed that society could be prepared for a new kind of benevolent cooperation. If we are "to do justice to the difficult, unfinished, and almost forgotten laboring of American culture" (159) as Denning argues we must, we should reconsider the place of anarchist individualism in that laboring and seriously scrutinize the assumption that the Left - old or new - has drawn its primary identity from variations on Marxist thought.
Individualism, Anarchism, and Popular Cold War Dissent
<22> If Matthiessen's refusal to validate the Popular Front's agitprop and to elevate instead a handful of classics of American literature as providing revolutionary models of thought and action paralleled Emma Goldman's, so too did key components of his specific literary canon. In the 1917 verdict in the trial of two anarchists, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, for disseminating anti-conscription literature and holding rallies that opposed U.S. involvement in World War I, for example, Emma Goldman invoked Thoreau and Emerson to justify her individual liberty to dissent. "But never would I change my ideas because I am found guilty," she argued. "I may remind you of two great Americans, undoubtedly not unknown to you, gentlemen of the jury; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau." Though New Americanists emerging from the New Left argue that Matthiessen's canon underwrote an anti-cooperative ethos of individualism, the court did not defend Goldman's "masculine," "rugged individualism" as a core American value to be protected and upheld. Rather, it spoke on behalf of the authoritarian collectivism that war, including cold war, engenders:
We have no place in this country for those who express the view that the law may be disobeyed in accordance with the thoughts of an individual. I am expressing not my view alone, I am expressing the view of what we in America understand to be the views of a true democracy and a true republic. (The Emma Goldman Papers, Trials and Speeches of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman)
"We have no place in this country," the institutional voice was proclaiming in 1917, "for Henry David Thoreau and civil disobedience, for Emma Goldman and her literary interests."
<23> For anarchist immigrants to the United States like Goldman, the court's verdict contradicted the very promise of America, a place that they believed had enormous potential for an anarchist future due to its fierce tradition of anti-statist liberalism. For Goldman and others, the anarchist impulse was contained in core works of American literature, ones which, as Leftists like Matthiessen were busy valorizing them, played second string to a more conservative, Christian canon with John Greenleaf Whittier at its heart. Inspired by this sense of affinity between anarchism and American traditions, Goldman's anarchist language in her immensely popular lectures often echoed the American writers she admired. According to Goldman, writing in strongly Emersonian language in her essay "The Individual, Society, and the State," individuality was "the genius of man" and "the true reality in life." The individual, "A cosmos in himself,"
does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress. Civilization [meanwhile] has been a continuous struggle of the individual or groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship. (111)
Since the very basis of society, for Goldman, was the individual, who "remains the most fundamental fact of all human association, suppressed and persecuted yet never fully defeated" (111), all social conduct should properly be conducted so as to allow the full maturation and expression of the actualized self. The aspiration for this state of non-government was, she argued, contained in literary works that, as she attempted to do at her anti-conscription trial, could be deployed to awaken Americans to the anarchist radicalism inherent and implicit in their best works of republican literature and philosophy.
<24> While Goldman was the most outspoken interpreter and defender of such republican individualism among the anarchists who wrote for her magazine Mother Earth, Voltairine de Cleyre was its most lyrical celebrant. Born in Michigan in 1866, a rare native-born anarchist among her peers, and named by her father - a French immigrant and freethinker - after Voltaire, de Cleyre sought to uncover intimations of anarchism in the American past. A poet and short story writer as well as essayist, her prose at its best displays a mastery of the English language suggestive of wide and lifelong reading in American works, as in this passage from "Anarchism and Literature" paralleling Emersonian and Thoreauvian ideals to anarchist yearnings for individual liberty:
None who are familiar with the thought of Emerson can fail to recognize that it is spiritual Anarchism . . . And he who has dwelt in dream by Walden, charmed by that pure life . . . has felt that call of the anarchist Ideal which pleads with men to renounce the worthless luxuries which enslave them, that the buried soul which is doomed to mummy clothes by the rush and jangle of the chase of wealth may answer the still small voice of the Resurrection, there, in the silence, the solitude, the simplicity of the free life. (145-46)
In de Cleyre's view as she presented it in "Anarchism and American Traditions," American traditions - America's revolutionary impulse, its Jeffersonian idealism, and its Transcendentalist seeking after higher laws and self governance - all resonated with anarchist idealism: "liberty was nurtured by colonial life," forged "in the isolation of pioneer communities" which "threw each individual on his own resources . . . yet at the same time made very strong social bonds," and perfected in "the comparative simplicity of small communities." "All this" however, "has mostly disappeared," and in its place Gilded Age America was left with "the sin our fathers sinned" when "they did not trust liberty wholly" and "thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government" (39). It was from that sin that the anarchist, like Thoreau at Walden Pond, was awaiting, and actively seeking, redemption and spiritual "Resurrection."
<25> The anarchist syndicalist Rudolph Rocker held a similar view of American radical and literary history, as he wrote in Pioneers of American Freedom. Like Emma Goldman, the Russian Jew, and Voltairine de Cleyre, the second-generation French immigrant, Rocker, a German expatriate, sought signs of anarchist revolution in the American republican tradition. He argued that a review of the radical republican strain of American liberalism showed that anarchism "had found literary expression in America before any modern radical movements were even thought of in Europe" (xx). In his attempts to naturalize European anarchism in an American context by attributing anarchism to American origins, Rocker may have been looking to flatter his American audiences. On the other hand, his tracing of the anarchist tradition to its origins in a dialogue between English and American colonial thought opens a transnational channel for reading radical history predating Soviet internationalism and Western Marxism. The fact that "nations avail themselves of mutual stimulation," he argued in Pioneers of American Freedom, "stands out with special vividness in America because the material and intellectual culture was derived directly from colonization" and "almost every people of Europe has contributed to it" (xix). For Rocker, American political radicalism - with its individualist anti-statism - was a direct outgrowth of the basic ideas of American liberalism, which was itself informed by European traditions. Implicitly, Rocker was arguing that "outsider" Europeans - Germans, Jews, and intellectuals with strange French names like de Cleyre - actually offered a fulfillment of America's promise of a stateless society. Indeed, the intellectual leaders of American anarchism early in the twentieth century were almost entirely foreign-born, a fact that makes their search for an anarchist idiom in American literature at least as compelling as the search by American-born "Western Marxists" for an immigrant, working-class idiom for American literature.
<26> One of the most forgotten insights into American literature, in fact, has been the once generally assumed notion that it contains a remarkable anarchist strain. Much of the American left has come to acquaint anti-statism, tax resistance, and local governance - some of the common themes running through nineteenth century radicalism and literature - with the Right even as, in the name of these values, the Right and the Left alike expand taxes and further centralize state power. The assumption that American individualism is the purview of the Right, however, has not always been generally held. Vernon Louis Parrington, for example, noted in his Main Currents in American Thought (1928) that in the composition of "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau - that "masculine individualist" supposed to have posthumously upheld cold war conservatism - "quite evidently [had] turned philosophical anarchist" (409); and John Macy, in his 1908 The Spirit of American Literature, called Thoreau "our village anarchist" whose ideas "should be read by us timorous moderns to renerve us in time of abuse" of government power. (179). More recently, the anarchist historian George Woodcock has argued that Thoreau's overt political writing appears in a long lineage of anti-government dissent that has sustained America's left civil disobedience tradition (191-199). Like Rocker and de Cleyre, Woodcock sought intimations of anarchism in radical liberalism, whose most cogent mainstream prophet was the hermit of Concord influenced by the Transcendentalist turn. This turn itself, as the anarchist authors writing in America agreed, emerged directly from the central ideas in the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and, more to the point, Tom Paine.
<27> Nor are the pre-World War II critics, offbeat Popular Frontists like F.O. Matthiessen, and a handful of anarchists the only public figures to announce and propagate the rebellious spirit of American radical republicanism to achieve leftist ends. A great deal of the spirit of the student Left of the 1960s, as David Deleon argues in "The American as Anarchist: Social Criticism in the 1960s," was inspired by anarchist models, a fact which helps to explain the New Left's ire at the Old Left's implicit statism (even as the New Left adopted personality cults from other states). A perusal of the publication dates of anarchist works like Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of An Anarchist draws attention to the resurgence of interest in anarchism in the 1960s. First published in 1912 by Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Press, Prison Memoirs remained almost dormant until its republication by two presses in 1969 and 1970, respectively. John William Ward, a cold war American Studies scholar who wrote the introduction to one of these volumes and who was apparently immune to the supposed conservatism of American Studies in these years, garnered national attention by protesting the Vietnam War while president of Amherst College. Inspired by anarchism's call for direct action and convinced that the direction of American life during the Vietnam War contradicted the anarchist promise in American thought and literature, Ward's unprecedented public act of civil disobedience - no other university president let himself get arrested in an act of protest against the war - linked the spirit of his time with the pre-Popular Front period of anarchist resistance (Brown, "The Disobedience of John William Ward). Other writers - Smith College student Eunice Schuster in her 1932 Native American Anarchism: A Study of Left –Wing American Individualism and Lewis Perry in his 1973 Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought - find in strains of American Christianity a "native" anarchism that underwrote the radical abolition movement. In Christian anarchism, whose roots are found in British and colonial antinomianism, God's dominion over humankind and the earth renders government incursion into human conscience religiously immoral and politically intolerable.
<28> In view of the long history of the anti-statist Left in the United States, the Western Marxism emphasized in Denning and Wald's work begins to appear as an apparition whose influence on American culture was limited by its relative unpopularity. In the view of Kenneth Rexroth, who emceed the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in 1950 which brought the Beat poets to the attention of the West Coast literary establishment, this limited popularity resulted directly from the authoritarianism implicit in the East Coast Marxist intellectuals' tendency to trust other states even as they questioned the legitimacy of specific actions of the United States. "American radicals" in this Communist tradition, Rexroth argued, have time and again been put "in the ridiculous position" of "representing other people's foreign offices" - whether Moscow's in the 1930s and 40s or China's and Cuba's in the 1960s - even as another "dominant tendency in America," the one with which Rexroth identified, has been "anarchist-pacifist . . . and religious in various ways" (qtd. in Meltzer, 235).
<29> Rexroth - considered by some the father of the Beat movement, though he was uncomfortable with the moniker - appears in Denning's account as a West Coast radical with ties to the Popular Front who never quite fit the Popular Front mould because of his "attachment to the Wobblies" (5). For his part, Rexroth was among the Popular Front's most outspoken public critics on the left, one whose narrative of the rise of the Beat movement, while both aggressive and exaggerated for effect, offers a revision of left history that sees the Popular Front as a momentary move to the right, toward authoritarianism and statism. In Rexorth's view, the most salient characteristic of the Popular Front was its nascent authoritarianism, which Rexroth believed was fought long and hard by anarchist radicals throughout the Popular Front period until, at last, the victory in the 1950s went not the right wing, as Denning argues, but to a persistent anarchist movement that emerged in the Beat movement.
<30> On the West Coast, a libertarian tradition strongly influenced by the cultural memory of the IWW remained operative throughout the Popular Front decades and into the 1950s. For Rexroth, the 1930s and 1940s were decades of anarchist agitation against both U.S. hegemony and the cultural hegemony of the Popular Front over the left. Though they sought working class literature for their magazines, Popular Front intellectuals, Rexroth argued, were essentially bourgeois magazine publishers. So continuous and successful had the anti-statist, anarchist propaganda emanating from the West Coast been through two the decades of Popular Front influence that by the mid-1950s, "It was no longer necessary to educate somebody to make an anarchist poet out of him. He had a milieu in which he could naturally become such a thing" (235). This milieu gave birth in the 1950s to the literature of anarchist and individualist dissent broadly called Beat literature, which drew from the individualism of the radical republican literary tradition codified in the American canon that had been formed in the first few decades of the twentieth century.
<31> If one accepts Rexroth's anarchist-centric narrative, a vivid picture emerges from the negative of Denning's account. For Rexroth, the radicalism of the teens and 1920s suffered two decades of repression by elitists who were soon to become mainstream, Pax Americana liberals after attaching themselves to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. This radicalism re-emerged in the 1950s in many ways, including: poets like Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen proclaiming their anarchism and aligning themselves with their anarchist cohorts in Japan; Jack Spicer and his circle in San Francisco inventing a confrontational camp-inflected sexual politics that defied authority; William Everson blending Catholicism with earthly desire; Alan Ginsberg remembering his communist Uncle Max while winkingly "putting my queer shoulder to the wheel". These poets met in San Francisco in and around Rexroth's San Francisco Anarchist Circle, a club that included working class poets (that is, Rexroth recalled, poets who actually worked in working class jobs, not white collar publishers seeking an authentic working class idiom), first generation anarchist immigrants, dances, propaganda, and open discussion about poetry and dissent. They forged a movement that carried radical politics through the 1950s and had an incalculable effect on the student left. Yet, in the 1950s, exactly where New Americanists find that old enemy of Marxism, "masculine" "individualism," Denning finds an almost complete suppression of dissent and the death of social democracy.
<32> Denning's portrait of the 1950s underestimates the strength and persistence of those figures like Rexroth, who were as Denning rightly notes influenced by their momentary alliances with the Popular Front. Arguably, the Beats were the fulfillment of the Popular Front as much as they were a precursor to the student left. Indeed, if the goal of the cultural front was to generate explicit popular dissent through cultural productions that would be accessible to a general audience while still containing radical messages, the Beats far outpaced the writers and editors behind the great New York "working class" magazines like New Masses. Recognizing continuity between the cultural front and 1950s intellectuals, Alan Wald comes closer than Denning to explaining the continuities of American literary leftism throughout the decade of black and white television. In Exiles from a Future Time, he places Mike Gold, editor of the Masses before it became the New Masses, at a Beat poetry reading in San Francisco, where Kenneth Rexroth and Alan Ginsberg read their poetry accompanied by a jazz trio. In Wald's description of Gold, however, The Masses editor's leftism was forged in the teens and 1920s decades of anarchist radicalism, and this influence became an unfortunate limitation on his left wing politics. Just as, for Denning, Rexroth's anarchism implied that he was merely "emotionally attached" to the Wobblies rather than seriously and politically committed to a particular vision of social revolution, Gold's anarchism, in Wald's account, was incomplete leftism: "Gold emerged from an anarchist political background that he never completely transcended," Wald writes, and this inability to transcend anarchism Wald parallels to Gold's "personal instability in the 1930s" exacerbated by his diabetes (40).
<33> While Wald acknowledges Gold's anarchism - if only to disparage it as something to be transcended - and places Gold in the context of the Beats, he ignores the latter group's anarchist politics and their dissent against Popular Front Communism. Ginsberg, Wald tells us, was the son of a socialist who wrote for the New Masses, as though this in itself should suggest continuity between the Beat movement and its statist precursor. However, Ginsberg's closeness to the Old Left is more an accident of birth and geography than an indicator of ideological agreement: he was a New York poet, and New York radical publishing happened to be dominated by Western Marxism when his father was writing. When it came time for Ginsberg to publish his own Howl, however, he entrusted it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books, a venture formed on the anarchist west coast by a poet who left the East Cost in part to escape the dominance of the publishing elite on the left. Of Rexroth's declaration of an anarchist victory over this elite symbolized by the rise of the Beat movement, Wald says nothing. Gold, however, we are told, wrote that the Beats would some day grow to maturity, curbing their aesthetic and ecstatic individualism and replacing it with a wiser politics (43).
<34> Wald's account moves Denning's forward into the middle of the 1950s but, like Denning, Wald limits the scope of his - and thus our - understanding of leftist public intellectual work in the twentieth century. Such limitations are inevitable, of course, insofar as authors chose subjects they consider compelling. One would rather read such authors than those who discuss works, people, and ideas only because they dislike their subjects with such vigor that it drives their writing. On the other hand, it seems necessary to draw attention to the limitations inherent in these Marxist-centric views because Denning and Wald themselves do not acknowledge them. Instead, they present anarchist figures close to the Popular Front as undeveloped both politically and emotionally: Rexroth had an "attachment" to anarchism, Gold's anarchism was related to his personal troubles, and the Beats belong somewhere in the socialist family tree, but even Mike Gold believes they had some growing up to do. Moving past these anti-individualist biases - ones which, unfortunately, are also reflected in the New Americanist revisions that Denning and Wald help to correct - provides one way of expanding and completing their and others' recent work on the literary Left in the United States. On the other side of the Western Marxist assumptions in these works lies a vast field of potential work on the complex, often divergent ideas and histories of the American left. Also on the other side sits an oversimplified decade waiting to see its radical, left wing literary individualism and the popular poets, artists, critics, and thinkers who espoused this individualism reconsidered and revitalized.
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