Dwight Macdonald

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Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) was an editor, journalist, essayist, and critic of literature, popular culture, films, and politics.

Dwight Macdonald was born in New York City on March 24, 1906, the son of Dwight and Alice (Hedges) Macdonald. Macdonald attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite private school in Exeter, New Hampshire, and Yale University, from which he graduated in 1928. After trying his hand at becoming a merchandiser in a training program at Macy's, Macdonald, with the help of a friend from Yale, became an associate editor in 1929 of Henry Luce's FORTUNE, the first issue of which appeared in 1930. Macdonald worked on FORTUNE until 1936, when he resigned to protest alterations that the pro-business magazine made in a series of articles he had written about U.S. Steel Corporation.

Macdonald devoted himself in the mid-1930s to discovering his own political philosophy. He read Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; became an enthusiastic anti-Stalinist; and, in 1937, became an editor of the radical Partisan Review. Macdonald joined the Trotskyist Party in 1939 and contributed articles to its monthly periodical, the New International. By 1941 Macdonald had broken with the Trotskyists, who had themselves split apart in a bitter factional dispute. In 1943, declaring himself a pacifist and objecting to World War II, he resigned from Partisan Review because of disagreements with its editor, Philip Rahv.

Magazine Editor and Writer

In 1944 Macdonald founded Politics, which appeared first monthly, then quarterly, until Macdonald abandoned it in 1949 to devote more of his time to writing. Politics published essays on politics and culture and included among its contributors James Agee, John Berryman, Bruno Bettelheim, Albert Camus, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, and Simone Weil. As editor of Politics Macdonald began to refer to his own politics as "essentially anarchist."

In 1951 Macdonald became a staff writer for the New Yorker. From 1960 to 1966, while retaining his role on the staff of the New Yorker, Macdonald was movie critic for Esquire.

Many of Macdonald's essays on culture and politics have been collected in books that are interesting both for their intrinsic merits and because they record and reflect the ferment of a generation of American intellectuals whose work spanned the Depression, the "Red Decade" of the 1930s, the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the birth and death of the New Left in the confusions of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Watergate affair, and the rise of neo-conservatism. Macdonald's Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (1948) is a polemic arguing, in effect, that the former New Deal secretary of agriculture and vice president did not deserve the support of the American Left, primarily because of Henry Wallace's professed admiration for Stalinist Russia. (Wallace was the 1948 presidential candidate of the Progressive Party.) Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1957) includes many of Macdonald's most important political essays, including a brief political memoir, "Politics Past," in which Macdonald comments on his Trotskyist period: "What strikes me most, looking back, is the contrast between the scope of our thought and the modesty of our actions."

The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (1956), which originally appeared as a series in the New Yorker, describes the "philanthropoid" as an institutional type and the Ford Foundation itself as "a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some."

A Sharp Critic in Many Areas

Against the American Grain (1962) contains Macdonald's celebrated attacks on James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed, on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and on the third edition of Webster's New International Dictionary. Against the American Grain also contains the famous essay on "Masscult & Midcult," in which Macdonald argues that mass culture is a parody of high culture and that mass culture serves modern industrial society by transforming "the individual into mass man," turning culture into an "instrument of domination" and making "a pluralistic culture impossible." Midcult, on the other hand, is a more recent and sophisticated phenomenon, according to Macdonald. Midcult is as formulaic and predictable as masscult, but pretends to be high culture, which it waters down and displaces.

Macdonald had by now clearly articulated his own fascination with popular culture and his own unwillingness to abandon high culture as a standard against which to judge it. Against the American Grain contains Macdonald's admiring review of Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce and displays Macdonald's characteristic suspicion of academic students of literature - but a suspicion overcome by a genuine and generous celebration of Professor Ellman's work and a convincing perspective on the place of biography in literary studies. Despite his frequent invocations of high culture as a standard of judgment and the wide range of literary learning that is frequently evident in his work, Macdonald produced no large body of critical writing on serious or "high" culture and literature, such as was produced, for example, by Philip Rahv or Edmund Wilson.

Macdonald's film criticism, collected in On Movies (1969), continued to work out his lifelong admiration for movies and his unwillingness to overlook or forgive the mediocre or meretricious. Still, as he said in the introduction to On Movies, "I wouldn't want to see a movie made by a director who had to learn to make movies from my reviews."

Macdonald's writing is learned, conversational, sometimes even chatty, digressive, personal, witty, constantly seeking the apt judgment, the appropriate attitude. William Barrett recalls the New York literary culture in which Macdonald moved as a band of passionate debaters. Macdonald, though he had left the core of intellectuals who formed the Partisan Review crowd, stayed in the debate, but, says Barrett, "he was not very good at argument, for he stammered. In his case the pen - or, rather, the typewriter - was mightier than the tongue; and where in written polemic he could spear his victim with a single deadly phrase or sentence, in oral argument he would become excited and reduced to an incoherent stammer" (William Barrett, The Truants, 1982).

Macdonald cheerfully conceded to Paul Goodman's criticism that he "thought with his typewriter," discovering what he thought by writing it down and revising it. And, as he also cheerfully admitted, he tried to reconcile a fascination for popular culture with a taste formed by high culture and a passionate interest in politics with a growing conviction that collective actions led to diminishments of humankind's essential individualism.

Further Reading

Macdonald's books include Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (1948), The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (1956), Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (1957), Against the American Grain (1962), On Movies (1969), and Discriminations (1974). Greenwood Reprint Corporation reissued Politics in 1968 with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. For discussion of the tradition within and against which Macdonald worked, see William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals (1982), and John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (1975).

Additional Sources

Whitfield, Stephen J., A critical American: the politics of Dwight Macdonald, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984.

Wreszin, Michael, A rebel in defense of tradition: the life and politics of Dwight Macdonald, New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) was an American writer, editor, social critic, philosopher, and political radical.

Contents 1 Early life and career 2 Politics and literature 3 Anecdotes 4 Works 5 See also 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links

Early life and career

Macdonald was born in New York City and was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University. His first job was as a trainee executive for Macy's but he soon moved to Time, where he was offered a position by his fellow Yale alumnus Henry Luce. From 1929 Macdonald was an associate editor at Luce's ambitious Fortune, an unexpected position for someone with Macdonald's literary interests. Like many writers on Fortune, his politics were radicalized by the Great Depression. He resigned from the magazine in 1936 over an editorial dispute, when the magazine's executives severely edited the last installment of his extended four-part attack on U.S. Steel.

In 1934, he married Nancy Gardiner Rodman (1910-1996), sister of Selden Rodman.

Politics and literature

Macdonald went on to edit Partisan Review from 1937 to 1943, but quit to start his own rival journal Politics from 1944 through 1949.^[1] As an editor he helped foster diverse voices such as Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Bruno Bettelheim, and C. Wright Mills. All along he was contributing to The New Yorker as a staff writer and to Esquire as film critic, gradually becoming famous enough to supply movie reviews on The Today Show in the 1960s.

Macdonald deserted Trotskyism, like many intellectuals of the time, and embraced pacifism and individualist anarchism.^[2] In the 1950s, he was fiercely anti-Soviet, maintaining a relationship with the anti-Soviet and more generally anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom. At one stage being considered a possible editor of the group's magazine Encounter, though nothing came of this. Later still, he was an even fiercer opponent of the Vietnam War and a great enthusiast for the student radicals of the 1960s like Abbie Hoffman. Showing characteristic unpredictability, he combined this new-found political radicalism with a pitiless cultural conservatism that paralleled Theodor Adorno's.

Most often thought of as a writer for The New Yorker, Macdonald also published more than thirty essays and reviews in The New York Review of Books, starting with that periodical's first issue of 1 February 1963. When Hannah Arendt was asked to write a brief introduction to a reprint of Macdonald's politics, her thoughts ("He's All Dwight") appeared in NYRB on 1 August 1968.

Anecdotes

Leon Trotsky is alleged to have said, "Everyone has the right to be stupid, but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege" - a remark that reportedly delighted Macdonald. Some, such as John Lukacs, reckon that Macdonald probably invented the remark and attributed it to Trotsky. Macdonald's biographer Michael Wreszin was unable to find any source for the epigram except Macdonald himself.

During the Columbia University protests of 1968, Macdonald expressed disappointment about the many red flags on campus that symbolized revolution. He complained that there were no black flags to reflect "my anarchist tastes."

Works

• Fascism and the American Scene (1938) pamphlet
• The war's greatest scandal; the story of Jim Crow in uniform (1943) pamphlet, research by Nancy Macdonald
• The Responsibility of Peoples: An Essay on War Guilt (1944)
• Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (1948)
• The Root is Man: Two Essays in Politics (1953)
• The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions - an Unauthorized Biography (1955)
• The Responsibility of Peoples, and Other Essays in Political Criticism (1957)
• Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (1960)
• Neither Victims nor Executioners by Albert Camus (1960) translator
• Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm - and After (1960) editor
• Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962)
• Our Invisible Poor (1963)
• Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1965) editor
• Politics Past (1970)
• Dwight Macdonald on Movies (1971)
• Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts 1938-1974 (1974)
• My Past and Thoughts : The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen (1982) editor
• A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald (2001) edited by Michael Wreszin

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Notes

1. ^ TIME April 4, 1994 Volume 143, No. 14 - "Biographical sketch of Dwight Macdonald" by John Elson (Accessed 4 December 2008)
2. ^ Mattson, Kevin. 2002. Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. p. 34

References

• Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World, Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0-19-505177-3
• Sumner, Gregory D. (1996) Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy
• Whitfield , Stephen J. (1984) A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald
• Wreszin, Michael (1994) A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight MacDonald
• Wreszin, Michael. editor (2003) Interviews with Dwight Macdonald

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Dwight Macdonald

• Biographical sketch of Dwight Macdonald by John Elson, TIME, April 4, 1994 Volume 143, No. 14

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