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An Oasis: The New York Intellectuals in the Late 1940s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Hugh Wilford
Hugh Wilford
Affiliation:
Hugh Wilford is Lecturer in American Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR, England.
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Extract

The early political activities of the New York Intellectuals, during the 1930s and World War II, form part of the canon of twentieth century American intellectual history. Their involvement in the American Communist movement, their crucial decision to renounce Stalinism, their brief adherence to Trotskyism, and their eventual disillusionment with Communism, are all well documented. Similarly, a great deal is known about them in the 1950s, especially about the role they played in the “Cultural Cold War” as America's leading anti-Communist intellectuals, helping to launch and run such organizations as the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and CCF's American affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF). Comparatively little, however, has been written about them in the period immediately after World War II, the second half of the 1940s. Accounts of their political evolution usually break off some time about 1945 and resume in 1949, only months before the founding of the CCF. The aim of the present study is to fill this gap in our knowledge, first by examining in some detail the history of Europe-America Groups (EAG), a political organization created by a group of New York Intellectuals during the late 1940s, second by analyzing Mary McCarthy's 1949 novel The Oasis, which contains a fictional portrayal of EAG and constitutes a revealing fictional record of the Intellectuals’ political position at this date, and third by tracing the organizational origins of the ACCF and CCF.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , August 1994 , pp. 209 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 None of the three recent major histories of the New York Intellectuals, Bloom, Alexander, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, Wald, Alan, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Jumonville, Neil, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Oxford: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar, deal in any detail with their political activities in the second half of the 1940s.

2 Wald, 241–45.

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4 For more information about the disputes between PR's editors see Cooney, Terry A., The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 184–92Google Scholar. A recent study of Macdonald is Wreszin, Michael, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994)Google Scholar.

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7 Niebuhr, Elisabeth, “An Interview with Mary McCarthy,” Paris Review 27 (1962), 77Google Scholar. For further recollections of the intellectual activities on Cape Cod in the mid-1940s see Simpson, Eileen, Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (London: Faber, 1982), 161–63Google Scholar; and Gelderman, Carol, Mary McCarthy: A Life (New York: St Martin's Press, 1989), 119–24Google Scholar.

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15 EAG manifesto, n.d. [probably Mar. 1948], Macdonald Papers.

16 In 1947, for example, the young Trotskyist, Irving Howe, accused Partisan Review of suffering from “Stalinophobia” — “a disease common among intellectuals who were once radicals: its major symptom is that regular tired feeling.” Howe, Irving, “How Partisan Review Goes to War,” New International, 13 (1947), 109Google Scholar.

17 Late in the spring of 1948 the PR/Hook faction hatched a plan to take over EAG by packing a meeting due to take place at Philip Rahv's house. Suspecting some such mischief, Mary McCarthy alerted members of the organization who did not normally attend such meetings, like her brother, the actor Kevin McCarthy, and his friend Montgomery Clift. Many years later McCarthy still remembered “the faces of Hook and company when they looked around Rahv's living room and realised they were not in the majority.” Gelderman, , McCarthy, 141Google Scholar.

18 Mary McCarthy to Dwight Macdonald, n.d. [probably July 1948], Macdonald Papers.

19 Dwight Macdonald to Mary McCarthy, 30 July 1948, Macdonald Papers.

20 Nicola Chiaromonte to Dwight Macdonald, 3 Sep. 1948, Macdonald Papers.

21 Nicola Chiaromonte to Dwight Macdonald, 15 Dec. 1948, Macdonald Papers.

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24 Alfred Kazin to Dwight Macdonald, 17 Nov. i960, Macdonald Papers.

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26 McCarthy, 117.

27 Ibid., 76.

28 Ibid., 152.

29 Philip Rahv to Dwight Macdonald, 24 Mar. 1949, Macdonald Papers; McCarthy, 81.

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34 McCarthy, 74.

35 Ibid., 152.

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37 Minutes of organizing meeting of Friends of Russian Freedom, 4 Mar. 1949, Macdonald Papers.

38 Phillips, William, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein, 1983), 149Google Scholar. For a detailed account of the formation of AIF, see Jumonville, , Critical Crossings, Ch. 1Google Scholar.

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