Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir

Here, then, an effort was mounted by the United States and its allies to hold the line against any further advances by the Soviet Union, whether operating on its own through military invasion or indirectly through the agency of local Communist parties. This policy was known as “containment,” and the struggle to which it addressed itself also had a name: the cold war.

It will not surprise you to hear that the anti-Communist intellectuals enlisted in that war on the side of the United States. But it did surprise some of them. What surprised them was not, of course, that they were against the Communists: they had been against the Communists all along, or at least for some years past. But being for the United States was a new experience to many of these people. All their lives they had thought of themselves as virtual foreigners in this country, as aliens—hence the term “alienated” was so often applied to intellectuals in America. As it happens, the community of anti-Communist intellectuals in America included a large number of Jews (and so, on the other side, did the community of fellow travelers), and no doubt this had something to do with their feelings of alienation. In those days there was still a great deal of open hostility to Jews in America and Jews were still excluded from many positions of power and influence. Even as late as the 1950s colleges and professional schools had unacknowledged but strictly enforced quotas limiting the number of Jews who could be admitted (I myself entered Columbia in 1946 under a seventeen-percent quota). Many firms would not hire Jews; many social clubs barred Jews from membership; Jews were unable to get rooms in many hotels or rent apartments in many buildings or buy houses in many neighborhoods. Even in the world of culture restrictions were still in force. At Columbia, for example, Lionel Trilling was the first Jew ever to be appointed to a professorship in the English department; and despite the fact that he had already done very distinguished work in the field, his appointment was resisted on the theory that as a Jew he lacked the background to understand English literature as fully as a “rooted” person of Anglo-Saxon ancestry quite naturally would. (This, I remind you, happened not in the Middle Ages but in my own lifetime and to a man you yourself actually knew.)

But it would be wrong to ascribe the alienation of the intellectuals in America entirely or even largely to Jewishness. For one thing, not all the intellectuals were Jewish; in fact many, and perhaps most, were WASPs from old American families whose position at the head of American society had been challenged by the rise of a new breed of Americans in the years after the Civil War. These old WASP families felt that the country was being stolen away and changed into a place that had no room for the likes of them. Edmund Wilson, who was probably the most important literary intellectual of his time, came out of just such a background, and in one of his essays he describes the difficulties his father and his uncles, educated at schools like Exeter and Andover and such colleges as Princeton and Yale and trained “for what had once been called the learned professions,” experienced in trying “to deal with a world in which this kind of education and the kind of ideals it served no longer really counted for much.”

Like the Jews down at the bottom of the social ladder, then, the old WASP families at the top had reasons of their own to feel alienated at a certain period in the history of this country. But whether they were Jews or WASPs, intellectuals had cause enough as intellectuals to feel like foreigners in America during that same period—the period running roughly from the end of the Civil War up through the end of the Second World War. It was during those years that America moved into the forefront of the modern world. This was the time when the West was opened up and settled, when the great railroads were built, when all the great industries were established—and many of the great fortunes. It was a time when, as Calvin Coolidge notoriously said during his term as president in the late 1920s, the business of America was business. So it was, and that meant that nothing else was valued very highly—certainly not intellectual and cultural pursuits or the “oddballs” who pursued them. Intellectuals were ridiculed and despised. They were impractical. They were effeminate. They had—in a famous American phrase—“never met a payroll.”

If I’ve given you the impression that the intellectuals were merely passive, pathetic victims and martyrs who took all this lying down, let me immediately set things straight. They didn’t take it lying down; they responded by developing a critique of America as a country in the grip of false and corrupting values. “The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS,” said the great philosopher William James, “is our national disease.” By the worship of success, James meant the worship of money, and this diagnosis of the American condition was confirmed by practically every important American writer of the period. Not only that, but it was extended into a merciless assault on practically every aspect of the national life. There was nothing good to be said about America, except perhaps that it had a certain raw energy and vitality. For the rest, in addition to being moneygrubbing and materialistic, it lacked any of the civilized graces. It was a “bourgeois” country, a narrow-minded country, a puritanical country, a philistine country. What else could one expect when it was dominated by businessmen and run entirely for their benefit? In such a country it was a badge of honor to be estranged or alienated; it signified a stubborn devotion to the higher things in life.

So powerful were these feelings of estrangement that they persisted right into the Second World War, when some intellectuals (including a few Jews!) saw no reason to “support” America even in a fight against so obviously greater an evil as Nazi Germany. But as the war went on, things began to change. Mary McCarthy once described the happiness she experienced when, as a young writer associated with Partisan Review and sharing the stock attitudes of contempt for and estrangement from “bourgeois society,” she suddenly realized one day that she cared about the outcome of the war, that she wanted the United States to win.

A few years later, in 1952, Partisan Review ran a symposium with the title “Our Country and Our Culture,” and the fact that a magazine which had always stood as the very symbol of the alienated intellectual could speak of America as our country in itself said more about the changing attitudes of the intellectuals than anything the contributors to the symposium had to say. Not that what they had to say contradicted the spirit of the new sense of personal identification with America expressed in the title. On the contrary. Though very few went quite so far as Mary McCarthy had recently done in an essay for Commentary called “America the Beautiful” (with only a protective touch of irony), many of them found virtues in the country and even in its culture to which they had previously been blind.