Renegades from Radicalism

THE TWO DECADES following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia make up one of the most unusual and provocative chapters in American intellectual history. For the first time, hundreds of American intellectuals flirted with the ideas of Marxism, and a good number of them became outright converts; some even joined the Communist Party. Impressed by the imagination and comprehensiveness of Marx's thought, these Americans were probably even more moved by the stunning triumph of Lenin's band of professional revolutionaries in Russia, a country that in many ways seemed least likely of all to lead the march of history.

The names of the men who were attracted to Marxism in their youth during the twenties and thirties reads almost like a roster of influential thinkers in modern America: Daniel Boorstin, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Granville Hicks, Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Aaron, and Murray Kempton, to name a few. Most of them ended up as respectable liberals. But even more intriguing than these liberals are those ex-Marxists who made a complete about-face, ending up as right-wingers. Smaller in number, they have been at least as important to conservatives as the others have been to liberal thought. Up from Communism is an examination of the intellectual evolution of four Communists who ended up at William F. Buckley's National Review, one of the nation's leading conservative periodicals.

The four--Max Eastman, Will Herberg, John Dos Passos, and James Burnham--differ in almost every way except the direction of their intellectual development. Eastman, a genial, flamboyant libertine, translated Marx's Capital into English, as he did many of the works of Trotsky, his intellectual mentor. He edited two communist journals, The Masses and The Liberator, and became a learned exegete of Hegel. Herberg, a lower-class Jew whose parents emigrated from Russia, received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia in 1932, by which time he had gained a reputation in radical circles as a complex and formidable thinker. Dos Passos, the illegitimate son of a corporate lawyer who refused to acknowledge him until he was fourteen, was a pacifist who was revolted by his experiences in the trenches of World War I. Radicals praised Dos Passos as the greatest American novelist of the age for his naturalistic writing and attention to social evils. James Burnham, an aristocratic graduate of Princeton, was a coldly analytical dialectician who became a leader of the party's Trotskyist faction.

According to Diggins, the only characteristic the four shared was an uncompromising contempt for liberalism:

Eastman criticized the polite liberal reformer who could not see the "beauty" of the revolutionary deed; Dos Passos looked upon liberal intellectuals as a "milky lot" armed only with "tea-table convictions"; Herberg dismissed liberal pragmatism as the ideology of the bourgeoisie; and Burnhad saw liberalism as a philosophy of hope without a philosophy of power.

No doubt this common attitude is significant, but more important is the fact that all four men were rather unorthodox Communists. None of them felt entirely comfortable with the corpus of Marx's thought, much less with the Stalinist Communist Party of the USA. Eastman and Burnham were both Troskyists who regarded Stalin as a Slavophilic counter-revolutionary, and neither accepted the Marxist account of the inevitable progress of history. Herberg was a member of the small Lovestoneite faction of the CPUSA, a bitter anti-Stalinist, and an exponent of "American exceptionalism"--the view that the US would have to follow a path to socialism different from that envisioned by Marx. Dos Passos was a pragmatist who never joined the Party and who was less a Marxist than merely an anticapitalist. The most glaring flaw of Diggins' book is his failure to recognize this critical similarity among the four.

DIGGINS' STRESS on the anti-liberal attitudes of the four is central to his interpretation of their development. He sees certain fixed characteristics in these men which are at the root of both their early attraction to Marxism and their later repudiation of it in favor of conservatism. "Open a copy of National Review," he says, "and we find the renegades from radicalism as cold war avengers. Positions have changed, but the passions remain." The ex-communist becomes an "inverted Stalinist", in Isaac Deutscher's phrase. Diggins defers to Deutscher's descriptions of such men:

He continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colors are differently distributed. As a Communist he saw no difference between fascists and social democrats. As an anti-communist he sees no difference between nazism and communism. Once, he accepted the party's claim to infallibility; now he believes himself to be infallible. Having once been caught by the "greatest illusion", he is now obsessed by the greates disillusionment of our time.

Although Diggins did not write that passage, it is typical in many ways of this book: facile, distorted, confused, irrelevant, and based on premises the author knows are fallacious. None of the four ever regarded the party as infallible, and none of them ever equated social democrats and Nazis. It is not precisely accurate to say they had been "caught", since each remained largely detached from the mainstream of the Communist movement and often critical of it. To call them "inverted Stalinists" raises the question of why they never were Stalinists in the first place.

In fact, the conversions are not easy to explain, although one can perceive traits in the young Marxists that might have been critical in the transition to the old conservatives. Diggins acknowledges such traits, while regarding them as secondary. Eastman was a skeptic who rejected Marx's dialectic view of history even as he remained committed to establishing the kind of order that Marx regarded as inevitable. He later became convinced that workers would fare better under capitalism than they had in Stalin's Russia, which as the years passed became harder and harder to dismiss as an aberration. Eastman wrote an ex-Marxist liberal in 1941: "The real difference between us and you, in my opinion, is this: In a period when certain means we had all agreed upon for emancipating the working class, and therewith all society, have proved to lead in the opposite direction, we have remained loyal to the aim, you to the means." Dos Passos despised Communism for the same reason he hated corporate capitalism--he detested organization and bureaucracy. He ended up yearning for a misty Jeffersonian order of agrarian individualism. Herberg's conversion was religious in nature, and the most enigmatic of all. Burnham, like Eastman, rejected the "scientific" claims of Marxism and finally concluded that the goals it held up made no sense.

The most arresting characteristic common to all four men during their radical years was their inability to accept the whole of the Marxist conception of the world. None of them were convinced of the validity of Marx's interpretation of history, which Marx regarded as central to his entire construction. They had other doubts--Burnham and Dos Passos about the role of art, Herberg about the existence of objective, material reality, Eastman about Marx's epistemology, among others. If there is a single explanation for their conversions, it is that each man began with substantive disagreements with Marx and only gradually worked out the logic of their implications.

DIGGINS HAS PROVIDED a lucid and accurate intellectual biography of Eastman, Herberg, Dos Passos and Burnham, as well as a useful picture of the temper of the age in which they lived. If his interpretation of the reasons for their conversions is faulty, his book nonetheless presents a complete picture of the material facts. If Diggins fails, it is because he ignores his own evidence, and because he prefers a neat, all-encompassing solution to a more complex and perhaps less satisfying one.

The book has other flaws. While Diggins is capable of a sophisticated discussion of Eastman's critiques of Hegel, he is also prone to the most inane nonsense, as when he asks, "If communism ultimately brought Herberg to religion and to William Buckley, should Buckley thank Stalin for doing God's work?" What difference does it make? In his concluding chapter, "Conservative Paradoxes", Diggins remarks that "In Nixon's heralded detente with Russia and China, one sees that a politician nurtured on McCarthyism can be anti-communist without being anti-totalitarian." Is Diggins saying that Russia and China are totalitarian but not Communist? That detente is an outgrowth of McCarthyism? That Nixon should be regarded as a serious conservative intellectual? The muddled logic and vague implications make it hard to follow Diggins' drift.

More often than not, Diggins prefers the easy, superficial one-liner to the serious argument. He quotes Edmund Wilson's succinct and moronic explanation of Dos Passos' conversion: "On account of Soviet Knavery/He favors restoring slavery." and asks "Fair or foul?" The reader can almost hear Diggins giggling in self-satisfied delight. Elsewhere he is simply pretentious. In an account of Buckley's attempts to reconcile Catholic theology with free-market economic precepts, Diggins intones solemnly, "Indeed conservatism, capitalism, and Christianity present an impossible synthesis." His penchant for constant alliteration, even when it requires the use of inappropriate words, is equally annoying.

Up from Communism is a curiously uneven book, a mixture, on one hand, of impeccable scholarship and, on the other, easy simplifications that skirt the issues raised by such conversions. The basic flaw is that Diggins finds himself unable to achieve a serious interpretation of the intellectual evolution of these four men, due to his own preoccupation with the politics of the sixties and seventies. Unable to distinguish these intellectual conservatives from the likes of Nixon, he ends by trying to subtly discredit them. If it is true, as one former radical said, that "the final struggle will be between the communists and the ex-communist", then this prelude to that struggle surely deserves better.