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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [213], (1) Lines: 0 to 5 ——— 7.07199pt ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [213], (1) Appendix Wanted by the fbi: No. 727437b a.k.a. Irving Horenstein “An Immature Outlook on Life” John Rodden I The fbi file on Irving Howe discloses that the Bureau followed his activities closely for more than eight years. It searched his records extensively; interviewed numerous neighbors and colleagues to uncover information about his activities; and pursued him as a national security risk even long after he had resigned from the Independent Socialist League (isl), a tiny, New York–based, Trotskyist sect.1 The file contains 148 pages—15 of them partially or wholly blacked out. It runs from February 27, 1951, to April 14, 1959, and covers reports from regional fbi bureaus in New York City, Albany, Newark, St. Louis, Miami, Boston, and Detroit.2 Most of these reports address Howe’s activities in the isl and his membership in Trotskyist organizations in the 1940s and ’50s. Much of the file also covers Howe’s statements in public lectures and presentations on the Soviet Union and on the changing nature of Stalinism during the 1950s. A revealing (though perhaps unsurprising) feature of the file—which speaks volumes about the standard data-collection methods of secret intelligence agencies—is that no agent ever seems to have read any of Howe’s work in order to ascertain his political positions, except for the joint resignation letter that he and Stanley Plastrik submitted to the isl in 1952, a copy of which was surreptitiously obtained by an informant to the Bureau. The highlight of the fbi file on Howe (a name that the Bureau persisted in treating as his “alias”) is the hour-long interview that two agents sprung 214 Appendix 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [214], (2) Lines: 50 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [214], (2) on him in August 1954.3 When they approached him as he entered his car on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the agents were impressed by his “friendly and cordial manner,” though they urged that a security index file be opened on him for long-term surveillance. Although Howe was never confronted directly again by any agents or interviewed by them, the fbi kept watch on him for five more years. Reports continued to be placed in his file on his lectures to university audiences and to political clubs and even on his lost luggage in France during a trip to Europe in 1957.4 Howe’s fbi file also furnishes valuable biographical background for his repeated castigation of McCarthyism in the 1950s: it shows that Howe himself was being “tailed.” Such information both contextualizes his radical critique of U.S. policies and undermines part of the ad hominem neoconservative attack on his writings during the McCarthy period. Many contemporary critics of Irving Howe have written that his 1954 essay “This Age of Conformity ” reflects his hypersensitivity about American complacency in the 1950s regarding First Amendment freedoms. These critics imply that Howe harbored excessive and even irrational fears about government infringement on American civil liberties and encroachments on personal privacy. His first biographer, Edward Alexander, refers to Howe’s indictment of liberals who fail to take seriously the threat to civil liberties as “compulsive.” But the fbi file makes clear that the so-called compulsiveness was an appropriate vigilance in his own case.5 Indeed, Howe’s fbi file proves that his concerns voiced in Dissent about the sorry state of American civic life were well-founded.6 His wife was subject to investigation during her years as a teacher at Miss Fine’s Day School in Princeton. His own lectures and seminars were attended by Bureau agents or by informants to the fbi, his mail was checked repeatedly, and his personal information (physical characteristics, children, residence, phone numbers, car model) was monitored as it changed—and this eavesdropping continued for almost seven years after his formal resignation from the isl.7 Despite this extensive and intrusive surveillance of his...

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