Archibald MacLeish Rediscovered: The Poetry of U.S. Foreign Policy

20 Historically Speaking January/February 2007 Archibald MacLeish Rediscovered: The Poetry of U.S. Foreign Policy Justin Hart The intellectual contributions of Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) to American public life are overdue for a reassessment. Certainly , he is still known to millions of Americans above a certain age as the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and playwright whom the New York Times once dubbed "die most influential poet writing in America today." Since die 1960s, however, his reputation as a writer of verse has declined steadily to the point where he now makes only rare appearances in the poetic canon. His death in 1982, although mourned publicly by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Daniel Boorstin, and President Ronald Reagan, represented more of a nadir than a zenitii in his influence on American life and letters. This is a shame, because it may now safely be said that if MacLeish's poetry was once overrated , his contributions to mid-20th-century public policy and political philosophy have been highly underrated. The period of the "public MacLeish" extended from the late 1930s, when FDR appointed him the Librarian of Congress, to the late 1 940s, when he left government service for good to return to full-time writing and teaching. During this period, he rejected bodi the stance of political detachment he had adopted during the 1920s as an expatriate writer in Paris and his vague flirtation with communism at the height of die Great Depression. In the face of totalitarian challenges from both the Left and the Right, he made eloquent and passionate appeals for the continuing relevance of democracy in an age of political revolutions. MacLeish was somediing of a modern-day Renaissance man, known for being successful at literally everything he tried. Although regarded as the very epitome of the Ivy League Brahmin intelligentsia, MacLeish was actually born in the Chicago suburb of Glencoe, Illinois on May 17, 1892. His father, a Scottish immigrant, was a successful merchandiser, while only his mother, who prior to her marriage had been a professor of mathematics at Vassar College, had roots in New England. MacLeish starred as a football player at Yale, where he became a member of the prestigious secret society Skull and Bones. He went on to pursue a promising career as a lawyer that included a stint at a prominent Wall Street firm, while teaching constitutional law at Harvard in his spare time. During the 1920s, MacLeish tired of the law and devoted his life to poetry, joining most of America's greatest generation of writers as an expatriate in Paris. There MacLeish wrote several of his best-known poems and rubbed elbows—in many cases becoming fast friends—with Ernest Hemingway , F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, among others. After returning from Paris, MacLeish went to work for Henry Luce at Fortune magazine—an interJustice Reed administering oath of office to Archibald MacLeish, Assistant Secretary in charge of Public and Cultural Relations, December 20, 1944. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USW3-056448-C]. esting pairing of two future advocates for the American Century. MacLeish's favorable reporting on the New Deal in the pages of Fortune brought him to the attention of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who cajoled him into accepting an appointment as Librarian of Congress in 1939. His confirmation hearing in the House of Representatives produced more controversy than expected when New Jersey CongressmanJ. Parnell Thomas became one of the first Americans to use the pejorative "fellow traveler " to attack MacLeish's political outlook. MacLeish survived the confirmation process, however , and went on to publishA Time to Speak, his first major collection of nonfiction writings, at the end of his first year as Librarian. Containing searing tracts denouncing both those on the Left who called for an "American Revolution " to overthrow capitalism and those on the Right who apologized for fascism as a bulwark against communism, A Time to Speak represented a powerful call to arms addressed to intellectuals in the period of the American "phony war." As MacLeish wrote to Van Wyck Brooks in the fall of 1941, "the terrible changes and menace of...