Howard Brick

Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s

What causes a generation of intellectuals to switch its political allegiances in particular, to move from the opposition to the mainstream? In U.S. history, it is the experience of the Old Left intellectuals, who swung from avowal of socialism or Communism in the 1930s to apology for American liberalism in the 1950s, that raises this question pointedly. In this highly original and broadsweeping study, Howard Brick focuses on the career of Daniel Bell as an illustrative case of political transformation, combining intellectual history, biography, and the history of sociology to explain Bell s emerging thought in terms of the tensions between socialists and sociological theory. The resulting work will be of compelling interest to Marxists and American intellectual historians, to sociologists, and to all students of twentieth-century American thought and culture. Daniel Bell s route to political reconciliation was a tortuous one. While it is common wisdom to cite World War II as the force that welded national unity and brought Depression-era radicals to an appreciation of democratic institutions, the war actually turned the young Bell to the left. Opposing the centralized power of American business and military elites at war s end, Bell shared the new radicalism that infused Dwight MacDonald s Politics Magazine and motivated C. Wright Mills early work. Nonetheless, by the early 1950s, Bell had declared the demise of American socialism and endorsed the welfare reforms of the Fair Deal. Brick s study finds, however, that the new radicalism of the mid-1940s helped to shape Bell s mature perspective, giving it a richness and critical edge often unrecognized. Brick finds that the heritage of modernism, as manifested in social theory, knit together the process of political transformation, combining disdain for the false promises of liberal progress, estrangement from society at large, and reconciliation with a reality perceived to be full of unconquerable tensions. Brick locates the foundations of Bell s mature social theory in the historical context of his early work particularly in the political concessions made by the social-democratic movement, in the face of the Cold War, to the reconstruction of capitalist order in the West. The crucial turning point, in World politics as in Bell s thinking, can be located in the years 1947 49. After that point, the different strands of Bell s thinking came together to represent the contradictions in the perspective of a social democrat trapped by the iron cage of capitalism, who saw in his political accommodation both the road to progress and the rupture of his hopes. This peculiar paradigm, shaped by the experiences of deradicalization, lies at the heart of Daniel Bell s social theory, Brick finds. At the present critical point in American history, as a new generation of leftist intellectuals undergoes a process similar to that of Bell s generation, Brick s work will be especially important in understanding the historical phenomenon of deradicalization.

ACHIEVING the American SOUL

In 1963—as good a date as any to serve as a pivot between “fifties” and “sixties” America—James Baldwin remarked, “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace.” It was a bracing declaration, a bit gentler than Malcolm Xs designation of Negroes as “victims of Americanism” and perhaps by now, as historians focus ever greater attention on the nationally constitutive role of slavery and white supremacy, almost a commonplace. Yet Baldwins idea remains challenging to plumb and to fully inhabit. For at that moment, which both Kevin Schultz and Andrew Hartman suggest was preoccupied with “the very question of America and its meaning,” Baldwins little book, The Fire Next Time , upended the whole debate. He was no black nationalist and, notwithstanding his expatriate life in France, no “emigrationist,” for he believed that blacks in the United States were, socially and culturally, wholly of, if not in, this country; and yet, given the deep corruption in the national past, there was no “meaning” to return to, reclaim, realize, or vindicate as a promise of black freedom. The verb Baldwin chose, in a determinedly existentialist vein, was to “ achieve our country”—to create a viable moral meaning for national identity where none as yet existed. If Schultzs subjects, William F. Buckley Jr, and Norman Mailer, were “vying for the soul of the nation” and Hartmans warriors fighting “for the soul of America,” they were—in Baldwins perspective—chasing a chimera. Such a thing wasnt there; it was yet to come, if at all.

After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History: Hollinger, David A., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 248 pp.,

tion. According to Izecksohn, government-led “innovations in recruitment procedures conflicted with rooted concepts of individual freedom, local power, and the idea of nationhood” in the United States and Brazil (26). Conscription and abuse of the bounty system in the United States and the transfer of the National Guard to the front and the recruitment of individuals from higher social statuses in Brazil led to a breakdown in the relationships between each national government and its citizens. As Izecksohn explains, “patriotism was a casualty of war in both countries” (61). The final two chapters involve the recruitment of African Americans, both free and enslaved, in the Union Army and of slaves in the Imperial Army. In the United States, the recruitment of African Americans constituted a racial issue because service in the military reflected citizenship. Except for a few rare circumstances, enlistment in local militia units or the national military remained only the privilege of white males before the Civil War. In Brazil, however, blacks commonly served in the military, because service “was often a punishment for social undesirables” (96). At the onset of the Civil War, northerners resisted black enlistment; however, Izecksohn explains how the combination of slave agency—escaping to Union lines—and Republican policies—the Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation—led to African American enlistment in 1863. Although the enlistment of slaves in the Union military undermined the Confederate war effort, Brazilian slaveholders served as one of the primary supporters of the Imperial government. As a result, slave enlistment in the Imperial Army required the cooperation and sacrifice of Brazilian planters and slaveholders. Overall, Izecksohn argues that service in the Union Army offered greater incentives and produced more significant results than service in the Imperial Army. In addition to African American enlistment contributing to the end of slavery and helping bring about “social transformation” in the United States, most white northerners supported the war as a “project of state building” that settled the antebellum debates between the North and the South about the future of the nation (171, 90). In contrast, “Brazilian war efforts generated debts, resentments, and few practical benefits or ideological principles that might have given meaning to the bloody military victory” (176). Despite Izecksohn adding to the historiography of the Civil War in a global context, Slavery and War in the Americas makes its greatest contribution to the study of the War of the Triple Alliance. Seasoned scholars of the Civil War will discover little that has not already been published, for most of Izecksohn’s citations in chapters 2 and 4 reflect secondary analysis. For students of the Civil War, sections that include comparative analysis add the most significant and original insights to the historiography. As Izecksohn explains, “If we take the enormous transformations propelled by warfare in the whole of the United States, and compare them to the lack of structural changes in Brazil, it puts the Civil War in a different perspective” (171).

29.95, ISBN 978-0691158426 Publication Date: May 2013

We will never agree on what we mean by the Cold War. The term may refer to U.S.–Soviet rivalry (in any of its long or short versions), to the U.S. policy of containment, to the sharp East/West division of Europe (1945–89), to the intersection of superpower contests with the torturous politics of decolonization—or all that combined, and more. The phrase works well enough in a book title, to be specified later in the text, but it lacks precision if assumed to mark a clearly bounded entity or to identify a causal force in history. When it appears as a modifier, it is always hard to know whether the object—for instance, “Cold War rationality”—was constituted by those events and forces we know as the Cold War, or whether it merely happened to emerge during the years when the Cold War also prevailed. What years were those, anyway? In the United States, “Cold War America” almost inevitably signals “the Fifties,” while we think the 1960s initiated the “unraveling of the Cold War consensus,” notwithstanding the ongoing Soviet-American contests through 1991. For the purposes of this essay, I will consider the years of the high Cold War to be 1948 through 1963. The books under review all place their central developments in that period, though their narratives of a particular mode of thought rising to prominence and then declining often stretch some decades beyond that time.

How to Think and Influence People in the American Cold War

In January 1946, a council of 240 delegates in the Philippines representing more than 10,000 U.S. soldiers chaired by Sergeant Emil Mazey (Sub-Base R, Batangas, Luzon) lodged a protest with the War Department against the slow pace of troop demobilization. The war was over. American troops had clasped hands with Red Army soldiers at the River Elbe in April 1945; Berlin fell in May, Japan in August. Why were they not yet home? Continued occupation of the Philippines was needless, for the Filipinos were friendly. Guerrillas in the Hukbalahap – the Peoples Anti-Japanese Army – had helped secure the islands. Since the Huks were initiated by the Communist Party of the Philippines, however, the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) was overseeing their suppression by measures including summary execution. In this context, GI resistance was not just about going home; it was an act of solidarity with Filipinos. When two Senators visited Luzon, Emil Mazey stood in a room full of generals risking court martial to testify that the Army had burnt surplus shoes, blankets, and jackets that could have gone to Filipinos. The occupation, he held, was laying the groundwork for peacetime conscription and a permanent military presence in Asia. As part of a worldwide U.S. troop “bring us home” movement, the Philippines rebellion was connected in myriad ways to a 1945–1946 working-class upsurge in the United States, where pent-up resentment about an inflation-pinched standard of living and vast wartime corporate profits resulted in the largest strike wave in American history. Millions struck in one sector after another: oil, coal, lumber, glass, textiles, trucking, meatpacking, and steel. The epicenter was auto, where the United Automobile Workers (UAW) – whose factory-occupation sit-down strikes in 1936–1937 propelled the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) – walked out at General Motors (GM), the nations largest corporation. “Open the books!” declared Walter Reuther, director of the unions GM department, demanding that the company boost pay without increasing consumer prices – or lay bare its ledgers to prove it could not. That was a page taken from Leon Trotsky, who had envisioned factory committees saying, “Show us your books; we demand control over the fixing of prices.” Soon GM granted a large wage increase, though without keeping prices down. Mazey, the son of Hungarian immigrants raised in Michigan, had worked in Detroits auto plants before entering the armed services.

War and Peace, 1939–1948

Id hammer out danger Id hammer out a warning Id hammer out love between All of my brothers All over this land – The Weavers, “The Hammer Song” (1949) “The bourgeoisie is fearful,” and “for good reason,” wrote Claudia Jones in a 1949 article in Political Affairs , theoretical organ of the Communist Party, entitled “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Despite servile “mammy” stereotypes in film and radio, she wrote, “Negro women – as workers, as Negroes, and as women – are the most oppressed stratum of the whole population” and “the real active forces, the organizers and workers, in all the institutions and organizations of the Negro people.” Joness account of black female “degradation and super-exploitation” owed much to her mothers death at 37, as well as her own experiences in a dress factory and laundry. Her appreciation of black womens history of resistance sustained her own. On January 19, 1948, Jones was arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the apartment shared with her sisters at 504 West 143rd Street, Harlem. Born in the British West Indies as Claudia Cumberbatch, she had arrived from Trinidad with her parents as a child in 1923, becoming involved with radical causes after encountering the Scottsboro Boys campaign in Harlem as a teenager in 1935. Employed first as educational director of the Young Communist League and then as secretary of the CPUSA womens commission, Jones – a “negress,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported – was now slated for deportation. “Subject was militant. Ridiculed being arrested,” New Yorks FBI agents cabled J. Edgar Hoover. Released on bail, with hearings pending, Jones embarked on a national speaking tour, excoriating the American “political Gestapo” for its fear of a “dangerous Red Negro woman.” In that same year, 1948, another Trinidadian, C. L. R. James, was first contacted by immigration authorities anticipating his deportation. By years end, James would publish “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States” in The Fourth International . Jamess article was a challenge to left-wing assumptions that class unity would solve racism.“The independent Negro struggle has a vitality and validity of its own,” held James, who saw American blacks as having a “hatred of bourgeois society … greater than any other section of the population in the United States.”

All Over This Land, 1949–1959

Daniel Bells books on social theory, cultural criticism, and political affairs included The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). A world-renowned sociologist, he was also recognized as a leader of ‘the New York intellectuals,’ who began their careers in left-wing movements of the 1930s and achieved prominence by the 1950s as proponents, mostly, of liberal anticommunism. Bells support of Cold War containment policy and political moderation, alongside his critique of countercultural hedonism, made his work the target of left-wing criticism, which often obscured his actual long-standing social-democratic convictions.

Bell, Daniel (1919–2011)

How are we to grasp the genealogy of the “public intellectual”? When, how, and at whose hands did this term first come into use, framing an ideal of democratic responsibility for those who devote their work life to fostering knowledge and criticism—an image usually raised as a reproach to academic insularity though also sometimes assailed for encouraging an evasion of scholarly rigor? At first blush, the phrase seems redundant: the emergence of “intellectual” simpliciter is usually linked to a particular episode—the Dreyfusards’ defense of the French republic—that already implied a commitment by writers, thinkers, and artists to political or civic action. From that time and place, the term traveled quickly across borders and before long to the United States, occasioning controversies from the start over who represented the “intellectual” as a social type and who did not, what activities or purposes best defined the role, and whether that role deserved respect, derision, or reinvention. To be sure, the social, cultural, and political world of “modern” societies has always featured individuals noted for scholarly, creative, speculative, or critical work that resonates with literate audiences attuned to key issues of the moment—whether such people were known as ministers, philosophes , journalists, poets, men or women of letters, Transcendentalists, or even, in some eighteenth-and nineteenth-century usages, natural philosophers or scientists. Nonetheless, the emergence of the noun “intellectual” (and its plural) from the early twentieth century, and its widening use since the 1920s, spawned a persistent and self-conscious discourse concerning the character, value or virtue of such figures. A skeptic might conclude that the addition of the modifier “public” has perpetuated old, tangled debates about intellectuals as such, without bringing with it much greater clarity. Words nonetheless are signs of historical troubles and social discontents. Excavating the usages of “public intellectual” over time can highlight some of the dilemmas that have confronted writers, critics, citizens, and political actors, past and present.