Dwight Macdonald

Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was a U.S. writer, editor, film critic, social critic, philosopher, and political radical.

Early life and career

Macdonald was born in New York City and was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University. His first job was as a trainee executive for Macy's, but he soon moved to Time, where he was offered a position by fellow Yale alumnus Henry Luce. From 1929, Macdonald was an associate editor at Luce's business magazine Fortune. 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 (1910–1996), sister of Selden Rodman.

Politics and literature

Macdonald went on to edit Partisan Review from 1937 to 1943 but quit to start his own rival journal Politics from 1944 through 1949. As an editor, he helped foster diverse voices such as Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Bruno Bettelheim, and C. Wright Mills. All along, he contributed to The New Yorker as a staff writer and to Esquire as film critic, gradually becoming famous enough to supply movie reviews on The Today Show in the 1960s.

Politics

Macdonald broke with Trotsky, by raising the question of the Kronstadt rebellion, which Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks had brutally repressed. He then moved towards democratic socialism. He was opposed to totalitarianism, opposed both to fascism and to communism, whose defeat he viewed as necessary. He denounced Stalin's Soviet Union for first urging the Poles to rebel in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and then halting the Red Army outside of the borders of Warsaw as the German Army crushed the Poles, liquidating its leadership.

At the same time, he was critical of the methods that democratically elected governments were using to oppose totalitarianism. During World War II he complained of increasing fatigue and depression as he observed the progress of the war, particularly the commonplace bombing of civilians and whole cities. The fire bombing of Dresden and the dehumanization and mistreatment of German civilians horrified him. His political beliefs moved towards pacifism and individualist anarchism towards the end of World War II.

However, in 1952, Macdonald said in a debate with Norman Mailer that, if forced to choose, he "chose the west" and was opposed to Stalinism and Soviet communism as the greatest threats to civilization. He repeated this position in a revised version (published in 1953) of a 1946 essay, "The Root is Man." However, he later repudiated this sort of either/or position. In 1955 he became associate editor (for one year) of the magazine Encounter sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and participated in conferences sponsored by the Congress.

Mass-cult and mid-cult

During the later 1950s and the 1960s, MacDonald wrote cultural criticism, particularly of the rise of mass media and middle-brow culture, such as Thornton Wilder's Our Town, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and the Great Books of the Western World. In a December 15, 2011 review of a New York Review of Books re-issue of Macdonald's Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, The New Republic's Franklin Foer writes that Macdonald's effort in that work "culminated in a plea for highbrows to escape from the mass culture." "The highbrows," Foer writes, "would flee to their own hermetic little world, where they could produce art for one another while resolutely ignoring the masses." Tadeusz Lewandowski has argued that this approach to the culture question places Macdonald within the conservative tradition of cultural criticism as the twentieth-century heir to the English social critic Matthew Arnold. Previously the field of Cultural Studies associated Macdonald with the radicals of the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School.

Renewed radicalism

Primarily a writer for The New Yorker, Macdonald also published more than thirty essays and reviews in The New York Review of Books. His most famous and influential review, of Michael Harrington's The Other America helped to spur the Kennedy Administration's War on Poverty. A reprint of Macdonald's Politics elicited a brief introduction by Hannah Arendt in the New York Review of Books on 1 August 1968.

Later still, he opposed the U.S.-Viet Nam War and defended many student radicals of the 1960s like the Columbia University students who organized a sit in, during which university property and a professor's research was destroyed. In 1968, he signed the pledge of the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest", vowing to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the Vietnam War.

Anecdotes

Leon Trotsky is alleged to have said, "Everyone has the right to be stupid, but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege" - a remark that reportedly delighted Macdonald. John Lukacs thought that Macdonald probably invented the remark and attributed it to Trotsky. Macdonald's biographer Michael Wreszin could not find any source for the epigram except Macdonald himself.^{[citation needed]}

Works

• Fascism and the American Scene (1938) pamphlet
• The war's greatest scandal; the story of Jim Crow in uniform (1943) pamphlet, research by Nancy Macdonald
• The Responsibility of Peoples: An Essay on War Guilt (1944)
• Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (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 (1957)
• Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (1960) This was later republished with the title Politics Past.
• Neither Victims nor Executioners by Albert Camus (1960) translator
• Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm - and After (1960) editor
• Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962)
• Our Invisible Poor (1963)
• Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1965) editor
• Politics Past (1970)
• Dwight Macdonald on Movies (1971)
• Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts 1938-1974 (1974)
• My Past and Thoughts : The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen (1982) editor
• A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald (2001) edited by Michael Wreszin

See also

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

Reference

• Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World, Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0-19-505177-3
• Sumner, Gregory D. (1996) Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle: 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
• Wreszin, Michael. editor (2003) Interviews with Dwight Macdonald
• Lewandowski, Tadeusz. (2013) Dwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered ISBN 978-3-631-62690-0

External links

• Dwight Macdonald Internet Archive at marxists.org
• The Man Who Knew Too Much, The American Conservative
• Biographical sketch of Dwight Macdonald by John Elson, TIME, April 4, 1994 Volume 143, No. 14