Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [1]
At Exeter and Yale, Macdonald had been a mandarin, literary type and something of a dandy. He later claimed that he was radicalized at Fortune, where his reporting brought him face-to-face with the captains of industry, whom he found boorish and contemptible. He also, in 1934, married Nancy Rodman, a woman with a well-developed politics and a trust fund. She got him to read Marx; in 1936, just after leaving Fortune, capitalist tool of an earlier day, he voted for Earl Browder, the Communist Party candidate for president. The Marx did not mix well with the Luce, and Macdonald seized on the incompatibility with a characteristic combination of righteousness and glee. He saw, possibly, a way of exiting a job he disliked through the doorway of principle. In 1936, he submitted a piece, the last in a series, about the U.S. Steel Corporation that began with a quotation from Lenin. The editors rewrote the story, and Macdonald resigned.
Macdonald was an unlikely recruit to a political movement notoriously and fanatically obsessed with doctrinal correctness. The Communists he encountered in political meetings disgusted him; he called them “wobbits.” “They don’t have any brains,” he later said, “and they’re scared to death of each other and they have no sense of humor, no life!” He had become interested in politics just when the Moscow Trials were making news, so it was easy for him to turn against the Party, which he had never joined, and Stalin, whom he had never praised, and to become a Trotskyist. He proceeded to irritate not only the Trotskyist sect he joined—a faction of the Socialist Workers Party led by James Burnham and Max Shachtman—but Trotsky himself, who made Macdonald the object of a famous put-down. “Every man has a right to be stupid,” Trotsky is supposed to have said, “but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.” Whether Trotsky ever expressed just this thought in just this way is not established (though it is certainly the kind of thing that Trotsky was accustomed to saying about his antagonists: “stupid” had specific dialectical force in Marxist polemic). But Macdonald, to his credit, treated it as a wound honorably incurred by an intellectual warrior, and he repeated the remark against himself throughout his life.
In 1937, Macdonald joined Philip Rahv and William Phillips in the repositioning of Partisan Review. The magazine had been started in 1934 as (according to its subtitle) “A Bi-Monthly of Revolutionary Literature Published by the John Reed Club of New York,” an organization controlled by the Communist Party. An editorial statement informed readers that “The defense of the Soviet Union is one of our principal tasks...We shall combat not only the decadent culture of the exploiting classes but also the debilitating liberalism which at times seeps into our writers through the pressure of class-alien forces.” At first, the magazine featured proletarian literature, along with literary criticism exhibiting an impressive degree of polemical rigor. By 1936, though, Rahv and Phillips were looking for a way to break with the Party. They found in Macdonald a natural iconoclast, as well as a man agreeable to housing the magazine’s editorial offices in his apartment. Nancy Macdonald served as business manager.
Partisan Review was a literary magazine—the John Reed Club was a writers’ organization—and the purpose of the break was to liberate the magazine’s fiction, poetry, and criticism from Stalinist orthodoxy, and particularly from proscriptions against avant-garde art and literature. The editors proposed to combine a Marxist—or, at least, marxisant—political stance with a modernist, or avant-garde, aesthetic. Prima facie, this was an improbable