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94 Memorial for a Revolutionist Dwight Macdonald, “A Critical American” John Rodden Portrait of the (New York) Intellectual as a Yale Man Unlike his friend and intellectual contemporary Lionel Trilling, whose centenary in 2005 was commemorated widely in the U.S.—via national academic conferences as well as articles in the New York Times and the leading intellectual magazines—Dwight Macdonald’s centennial went largely unnoticed.1 Nonetheless , Macdonald was during the middle decades of the twentieth century “Our Best Journalist,” in Paul Goodman’s characterization in Dissent in 1958.2 That same year the historian John Lukacs speculated in the Jesuit magazine America that Macdonald might become “the American Orwell,” noting that Macdonald’s “lonely and courageous positions coincide with the often lonely positions taken by George Orwell amidst the leftist intelligentsia in Britain.”3 Indeed, from the 1940s to the early 1970s, Macdonald was the best-known political and cultural critic to the general American public. His finest work makes him a worthy descendant of H.L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson, and like them “an American, an American in the individualist tradition,” in Lukacs’ words. Dwight Macdonald had the (perhaps questionable) distinction of being cast—along with several other leading members of the Partisan Review circle4 — as the “typical New York intellectual.”5 Yet he is probably the most unusual candidate within their group for that dubious honor. Educated at Phillips Exeter and Yale University, Macdonald was an uppermiddle -class suburban WASP—unlike the other leading figures of the New York Intellectuals, a mostly urban Jewish group. Another notable exception in this regard—indeed, even more so as a female member of their circle—was Mary McMorris_FINAL .indb 94 Morris_FINAL.indb 94 9/25/2008 8:13:41 AM 9/25/2008 8:13:41 AM Memorial for a Revolutionist 95 Carthy, who became one of Macdonald’s closest friends.6 Macdonald served as the model for McCarthy’s essay “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man” and also for her character Macdougal Macdermott in her early postwar satirical novel, The Oasis .7 (Macdonald was also the object of Saul Bellow’s biting satire in Humboldt’s Gift, appearing in the figure of Orlando Higgins, the lightweight nudist intellectual.) The Political Pilgrim—Stage Left After graduating from Yale University in 1927, Macdonald soon joined the fledgling publishing enterprise of his fellow Yale alumnus Henry Luce as a staff writer for Fortune in 1929. Macdonald stayed with the magazine for seven years. He finally resigned when he felt that he was being politically stifled as he began to move leftward and embrace Marxism, a journey catalyzed by his 1933 marriage to Nancy Rodman and the influence of her wide circle of radical friends.8 Macdonald became a self-declared Trotskyist in 1936. Yet it was also true that, like many intellectuals, he became associated in the mid-1930s with the Communist Party because it seemed to represent the only decent alternative to what he judged the inexorable outcome of capitalism: imperialism, fascism, and economic depression. The Soviet purges of 1935–1938 deepened Macdonald’s commitment to Trotskyism and induced him to join the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1939, the main political sect of American followers . Macdonald did so with the fervor of a new convert—but with the retained critical faculties of someone who was no communist stooge. Inevitably, Macdonald’s falling-out with the SWP was just a matter of time: it finally occurred when Trotsky decided that regardless of the Soviet Union’s actions, such as the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 or the Soviet attack on Finland in the fall of that same year, Stalin’s Russia had to be supported— because it was a “worker’s state,” albeit a deformed one. This decision appalled Macdonald, who immediately and publicly began to criticize Trotsky’s views, both in SWP-sponsored organs and in the non-Trotskyist press. As a result, the SWP began to demand that Macdonald submit all his writings to the party leadership before publishing them. That was too much for Macdonald, who concluded that Trotskyism “was merely a variant of Stalinism.” Macdonald’s recalcitrance and skepticism toward the SWP leaders and even Trotsky himself did not please the “Old Man”: “Everyone has the right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege!” groused Trotsky.9 This zinger has been much quoted, though Macdonald’s biographer Michael Wreszin speculates that it may be apocryphal (and Macdonald’s clever invention).10...

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