Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Recently I’ve been reading a book titled Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words, by Joseph Dorman. It’s based on the author’s interviews with surviving members of a group that played a significant part in the thought-world – the intellectual culture – of twentieth-century America. 

These intellectuals were the children of immigrants who struggled to eat enough and be warm enough to survive, in cold-water tenements, at danger-fraught jobs in the Lower East Side’s garment district. As young men, most went to City College, where tuition was free or nominal. Another stratum, a bit less hard-pressed, went to Columbia University. My father graduated from Columbia’s future-intellectual-star class of 1925, along with his closest friend, influential literary critic and essayist Lionel Trilling. Also in that class were cultural critic Jacques Barzun, art historian Meyer Schapiro, radio personality and Book-of-the-Month Club judge Clifton Fadiman, former communist and author of Witness Whittaker Chambers and so on with other names – at one time nearly household names.

Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel Trilling, is one of the people interviewed in Arguing the World. In her memoir, she recalls that my father was considered by his classmates to be their “genius.” 

I don’t know if he was actually the class genius, or not. But he was one reason why I wasn’t fascinated by public intellectuals that I later met. They were not as interesting as he was.

For most of the group whose story is told in Dorman’s book, it goes like this. They enter adulthood as the economy collapses in the Great Depression of the 1930s. To them it seems clear that the fault for this lay in the capitalist system, whose downfall is imminent, which will precipitate the world-wide revolution predicted by Karl Marx. After which the downtrodden poor will inherit the earth – banishing all poverty, inequality and injustice. 

In City College, there were alcoves in the cafeteria where different varieties of Marxist assembled to eat and argue over whose version of the Final Battle was the correct one. The Trotskyists? The Stalinists? Most of these young people were Jews and – though they scorned religion as “the opiate of the people” – they brought with them debating skills that had been honed in the Hebrew schools of their earlier days, where immersion in argument had been a defining feature of Jewish religious training.

So what happened? Did they stay Marxists? Most of them did not. What changed them? It was quite dramatic. They had looked to the USSR – Russia after the communist revolution – as the vanguard country, the one that would inspire and conspire with its admirers to bring about the worldwide revolution. However, in the late thirties, extraordinary public trials were held in Moscow. The defendants in the Moscow Purge Trials included the most prominent communists of their time. Yet one revolutionary leader after another “confessed” under oath to having betrayed the revolution. If the confessions were sincere, what could have led such men to reverse lifelong commitments? But if the confessions were coerced? Well, that was creepier still!

Then Leon Trotsky, a communist who’d openly contested Stalin’s leadership of the party in Moscow, was brutally assassinated in the home where he had taken refuge in Mexico. Murdered for holding a dissident view of how the revolution should be conducted? Wasn’t that just what they all did with each other in the City College arguments at alcove 1?

Finally, Joseph Stalin, leader of the communist party and the Russian state, concluded a pact – an economic and political agreement with provisions both public and secret – with Adolf Hitler in 1939!

The Hitler-Stalin Pact was the last straw for most of the New York Jewish intellectuals. Step by step, they began to notice that the USA – the land to which their parents had journeyed with such effort and travail – was better, in fact much better, than the imaginary alternative on which, as young rebels, they’d projected their hypothetical visions.

They became – not revolutionaries – but liberals.

Since my parents had traveled a parallel trajectory, I read this story – filled in by its survivors in their final years – with recognition and interest. There was Meyer Schapiro, the celebrated art historian. His wife Lillian had been my pediatrician. As I’d been told, I cried for the first six weeks after I was born. Lillian recommended that my mother put a telephone book (they were thick and heavy in those days) under me. It hadn’t helped. I must have stopped when finally I got tired of crying. I sent Meyer Schapiro one of my earliest articles. It was on Hegel’s method. He called to tell me that he’d been teaching his students a similar method, of use in dating art works!

There was Sidney Hook, the pragmatist and political philosopher. He spoke at a meeting I attended – really just to hear Hook. Afterward, we talked a little. He did not know that my mother had died. (My father’s journal records Rachelle, my young mother, advising Hook, back in his young radical days, to take up writing because political action was wearing him thin!) “Rachelle too?” he said to me, learning of her death, shaking his head. About my father and his best friend Lionel Trilling, Hook said, “Henry was Lionel’s Jewish education! Before that, Lionel was …” trailing off … I finished the sentence for him, “English!” And we both laughed.

I remember writing Trilling’s wife Diana after her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, came out. There are 13 indexed references to my parents, all rather nasty. I wrote her a letter in defense of my parents, out of filial piety. She never answered. At the time, I thought that was shabby on her part. Now I learn from this book that she was quite debilitated at the time of writing her memoir, needing magnifying instruments in order to read. She devoted her last energies to her memoir. Perhaps she never read my letter.

I knew Hannah Arendt and Jacob Taubes at Columbia, both of whom make an appearance in this book. They all made their way, by their own trials and errors, into the intellectual conscience of this country.

This morning I read that a rabbi at Columbia University has advised Jewish students, and perhaps professors too, to stay home. For their own safety, not to set foot on the campus where I, and the generation before me, walked about in full freedom. I never thought of Columbia as a model community, nor its earlier times as halcyon days. Despite earning my masters with doctoral eligibility at Columbia, I went on to take my PhD at Penn State where there was less prestige to be had but more philosophical interest for me at that time. But decisions of that stripe are intra-academic. They assume that one can go where intellectual interest leads. They are made without conscious concern for physical safety. 

Such decisions are quite different from the ones you make about coming or going where your purpose is just not to meet head on – 

the youth-coming-to beat-you-up
who are now defacing Alma Mater.

Related Content: A Hegelian Key to Hegel’s Method | Lionel and Henry: In Fact and Fiction | The Big City and Me | No Place Like Home