The first serious biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy was written by Richard Rovere of the New Yorker magazine. It was immediately hailed as authoritaive, even definitive. As the Washington correspondent (although he spent most of his time in New York) for the magazine, Rovere had "covered" McCarthy from the Wheeling speech until his death in 1957. Backed by the presige of the New Yorker, Rovere was one of those select few who set the journalistc narrative. When he put that narrative between hard covers he made the first draft of history the only one we see.
At first glance, the New Yorker and Rovere seem an odd fit. The magazine was the most prestigious in the United States, renowned for both its meticulous fact-checking and its profitability. (For decades the New Yorker practically printed money as its pages swelled with expensive ads for luxury goods.) Rovere, of course, was a former communist who wrote for The New Masses and The Nation-- both Stalinist-controlled outlets.
Rovere was not the only Stalinist or fellow-traveller scribbling away for the magazine dedicated to getting and spending. Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, A. J. Liebling, and David Ogden Stewart were all there doing their part as Stalin's willing (if sometimes unwitting) drones.
Painting the Algonquin Round Table red represents one of Willi Munzenberg's signal triumphs. It serves as a textbook example of the means and ends of the Stalinist manipulation of the Popular Front.
The New Yorker famously billed itself as a magazine "not edited for the old lady in Dubuque." * It was the glossy magazine for what Lionel Trilling termed "the adversary culture" -- that part of the middle class that hated the middle class. Like Bloomsbury, the New Yorker was produced and consumed by people convinced that they were superior to their neighbors.
In the 1920s and 1930s Munzenberg made Stalinism integral to the adversary culture of the US and Great Britain. He managed to "instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility." The New Yorker was especially vulnerable to this ideological takeover.
Robert Warshow:
Munzenberg's second coup was to change the image of the Righteous. Virtuous poverty was out; glamour and the High Life marked the Popular Front activism of the 1930s. The righteous could keep their furs and jewelry -- as long as they kept supporting the Moscow line. The appeal was obvious and well nigh irresistible. Dorothy Parker was emblematic:
The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately."Munzenberg was a master at "prescribing the attitude to be adopted" for intellectual wannabees.
When Ernest Hemingway went to Spain in 1937, he took along his soon to be third wife-- Martha Gellhorn. A soon to be famous war correspondent, Gellhorn was a Popular Front dupe until the day she died. True to form she made sure that her sojourn was not wasted on mere politics and journalism. She made time for shopping. She returned from the frontlines with several pairs of handmade shoes and a beautiful fur coat of silver fox fur.
Parker's union of style and Stalinist attitudes was a natural fit. Through the chic of her hard-left commitments, Parker could both validate her love of glamour and mask it with an appropriate look of disdain for all vanities.
Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West
The ménage a trois of glamor culture, the adversary culture, and Stalinism conferred a striking benefit to Moscow's propaganda efforts. It gave them prestige--" that magical aura which captures the minds of the young in advance of argument and establishes compelling fashions'". (James McAuley)
Radical chic was not invented in the 1960s.
Related:
The Munzenberg apparatus, unlike the formal Communist parties, did not demand that every member sing in unison from the same songbook. In fact, it was essential that Willi's innocents should think of themselves as fiercely independent intellectuals. That was the genius of the Popular Front: to turn a flock of "independent minds" into reliable drones while allowing the sheep to see themselves as heroic, independent lions.
Persuasion and the Prestige Paradox: Are High Status People More Likely to Lie?
Dorothy Parker was an ideal target for the Munzenberg system. She had just enough self-awareness to see through the glib "wit" of the Algonquin Round Table and her own limitations as a writer. (Like Lillian Hellman, Parker's style was a cheap imitation of Dashiell Hammett's which itself was little more than an imitation of Hemingway.) Beneath her cynical façade lay a moralistic streak just looking for a righteous cause.
The Popular Front served up one such cause after another. Even better, she could be a leader in those causes -- rub shoulders with luminaries like Hemingway and Andre Malraux, sit at the head table at the glittering fundraisers, speak at all the important conferences.
Munzenberg's widow, Babette Gross, explained the propaganda style to Stephen Koch. Because he wanted the appearance of independence, the perfect righteous sheep never declared themselves a communist, pro-Soviet, or pro-Stalin. Instead, they were to focus their attention only on the cause du jour and the designated enemy.
One day the cause might be the Spanish Republic, the next it could be China in its war with Japan. No matter, tha apparatus pulled a few levers and the glamourous messengers found a brand new cause. (Martha Gellhorn, for example, had an uncanny knack of reporting about whatever issue Moscow deemed most urgent at any particular time in the 1930s.)
When an asset became dangerous or inconvenient, all the of sheep denounced the new enemy without hesitation. When John Dos Passos voiced his concerns about the Stalinists' actions in Spain, Hemingway warned him:
Hemingway was absolutely correct but Dos Passos was not a sheep. He refused to ignore what was happening nor would he be silent about his doubts. The Righteous NPCs proceeded to attack his work, character and courage. The "literary execution" of John Dos Passos did not muzzle that writer, but it did diminish his prestige among the righteous. It also served as a useful reminder to weaker artists about the dangers of straying from the flock.
You do that and you'll be finished, destroyed. The reviewers in New York will absolutely crucify you. These people know how to turn you into a back number. I've seen them do it. What they did once they can do again.
At the New Yorker, A. J. Liebling wore many hats. He was a food writer, a war correspondent, a chronicler of the demi-monde of Broadway and boxing. He was also one of our first professional "press critic". His "The Wayward Press" column scrutinized the way newspapers handled or mishandled the stories of the day. His analysis alternated between lofty disdain for and sly mockery of the grubby reporters and editors chasing headlines and getting it all wrong. He was particularly vexed by the post-war spy-scandals: the Hiss-Chambers confrontation and the revelations of Elizabeth Bentley. Liebling knew that Hiss was innocent and worked behind the scenes to aid his attorneys.
His depiction of Bentley was mocking and cruel. He dubbed her "the nutmeg Mata Hari" and portrayed her as a frustrated, middle-aged spinster: attention-seeking, given over to fantasies, even delusional.
In short, a woman no one should trust.
Of course, we now know that Hiss was guilty and that Chambers and Bentley were telling the truth.
Haynes and Klehr sum it up best:
It is not surprising that his collection of columns on these events have not been reprinted or included in the many anthologies of his writing.
The single most disastrous event in the history of Soviet intelligence in America was Elizabeth Bentley’s decision to turn herself in to the FBI in 1945 and tell all she knew.
Yet the consensus of several generations of American historians (backed by many journalists and other opinion leaders) routinely mocked, ridiculed, and dismissed her as a fraud and mountebank.
In 1982 Susan Sontag shocked an audience of New York intellectuals when she declared:
It can rightly be said that in 1950 the readers of the Hearst newspapers were better informed about Soviet spies and subversion than the sophisticated readers of the New Yorker. Munzenberg's work outlived him. It lives on even until the present.
Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?
*Tom Wolfe puckishly called the New Yorker the most successful "women's magazine" in history precisely because it appealed to a certain type of "lady in Dubuque". Shop girls read True Romance. Faculty wives who went to Smith, Vasser women married to assistant regional managers read the New Yorker. Or at least subscribed to it so guests could see it on the coffee table.
