The Dwight Stuff: The FBI vs. Dwight Macdonald

JOHN RODDEN has published Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings (2007), Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell (2003) and Lionel Trilling and the Critics (1999), among numerous other books. His most recent Modern Age essay was “A Young Scholar’s Encounter with Russell Kirk.” JOHN ROSSI is Professor Emeritus of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia. Modern Age previously published his essay “Two Irascible Englishmen: Mr. Waugh and Mr. Orwell.”

I

If there was one thing that J. Edgar
Hoover fiercely cherished, it was the
reputation of his FBI as the incorruptible,
all-powerful guardian of America from
its nefarious enemies, both domestic and
foreign. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s
Hoover carefully honed his proudly held
image of the honest G-man through a
public relations campaign that portrayed
the Bureau in a flattering light in books,
magazine articles, newspaper reports,
films, radio programs, and later on television
shows.

From this sensitivity grew a tradition of
trying to counter any individual or group
that threatened what Hoover saw as the integrity
of the agency that he had crafted
into an Argus-eyed behemoth, indeed into
one of the most powerful national police
forces in the world.

As a result, innocuous though the threat
would seem, it did not pass the Bureau’s
watchful gaze unnoticed when a littleknown
anarchist-pacifist journalist had the
audacity to scribble a few lines of defiant
graffiti on Hoover’s masterwork.

In 1942, the quixotic journalist Dwight
Macdonald (1906–82) tweaked Hoover’s
nose in a fl edgling, left-wing, New York
little magazine—and thereby ran afoul of
Hoover’s massive PR machine. Because of
Macdonald’s activities on behalf of various
radical causes and his writings in the
quasi-Trotskyist intellectual quarterly Partisan
Review—destined to become the leading
literary journal of the postwar era, yet
still relatively unknown outside New York
intellectual circles—FBI agents compiled a
dossier on Macdonald in the spring of 1942.
They tracked his life since 1929, noting the
places he worked, the articles he wrote,
and the political affiliations he established.
Their fact-gathering was spotty: for instance,
they claimed that Macdonald (usually
spelled “McDonald”) was a registered
Communist Party (CP) member in New
York in 1937 and thereafter broke with the
Party. In fact, Macdonald was never a CP
member; he despised the Stalinists, chafed
at Party discipline, and was a consistent
enemy of Communism and its fellow travelers
throughout his long career.

Dwight Macdonald was, however, a
heterodox socialist. In September 1939,
following the Nazi-Soviet pact in August
and the subsequent invasion of Poland by
the Germans and Russians, he entered the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which had
been formed from a Trotskyist group that
had split off from the Socialist Party. After
serving as a staff writer for Henry Luce’s
Fortune and contributing regularly to various
Trotskyist magazines in the mid-1930s,
he joined the editorial board of Partisan Review
in 1938. During the war, Macdonald
broke with his Partisan Review colleagues
and in 1944 founded his own magazine,
politics (which he always lower-cased). He
had fallen out with Partisan Review editors
Philip Rahv and William Phillips over
support for the Allied war effort and on
a variety of cultural matters. Macdonald
wanted to express with unbridled freedom
his own idiosyncratic antiwar views and
hold forth on what he regarded as the lamentable
state of American radicalism.¹

The FBI began keeping tabs on Macdonald
once he started raising money for
politics from like-minded former (and current)
Trotskyists and/or SWP members.
Probably Macdonald would have been
pleased to know that he remained on the
Bureau’s checklist of political radicals for
a quarter-century. He would have agreed
with E. L. Doctorow that an FBI dossier
placed one “on an American ‘honors list.’ “²
He might have been chagrined to learn,
however, that he never rose to the august
level of “security risk” (unlike his former
assistant, Irving Howe, a onetime politics
editorial board member and Trotskyist).³

The FBI’s agents struggled vainly to
make sense of where Macdonald fit in the
broader picture of American dissent. They
could never quite get a handle on him,
though they pursued him for decades, to
use Oscar Wilde’s phrase, with “all the enthusiasm
of a short-sighted detective.”

Macdonald’s FBI file totals more than
700 pages—hundreds more than suspect
writers (such as Ernest Hemingway or
Dashiell Hammett) or fellow erstwhile
Trotskyist intellectuals (such as Howe). As
we shall see, scrutiny of its contents furnishes
not only a fascinating snapshot of
what was happening in one corner of the
Left in the middle decades of the twentieth
century, but also anatomizes how a
uniquely gifted—and burdened—intellectual
engaged his times as both the political
landscape altered and his own social and
cultural convictions evolved.

Although we have emphasized that the
FBI’s failure to comprehend the American
radical scene led to a fundamental misunderstanding
of Macdonald’s politics (and
politics), that alone does not fully account
for the Bureau’s confusions about him. The
fact is that Macdonald was a gadfly and
avowed outsider—and he was sui generis, as
Czeslaw Miłosz once noted. Fundamental
to his sometimes puzzling eclecticism and
irrepressible distinctiveness—and an abiding
source of his interest for us today—was
his conservative ethos. For although Macdonald
was invariably a left-wing anticapitalist
whose political stands jumped
from Trotskyism to anarcho-pacifism to
quietism to liberal anti-Communism to
born-again New Left radicalism, he was
fundamentally a cultural conservative and
a vocal defender of high cultural standards.
Radical by conviction, Macdonald was
conservative in temperament and taste,
and this made him a traditionalist and even
a curmudgeonly elitist in his later years.
He came to hate avant-garde art and lashed
out at both the action painting of Jackson
Pollack and Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg
and Jack Kerouac. Unlike most of his
fellow intellectuals associated with Partisan
Review, Macdonald supported the awarding
of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to
Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos in 1948.
Macdonald condemned the poetry for its
anti-Semitism, but he praised the judging
panel for having conferred the prize on
the basis of literary quality, leaving aside
all political considerations, including the
fact that Pound was accused of treason for
his participation in Italian Fascist propaganda
against the Allies during World War
II. Macdonald noted approvingly that no
such state-supported award honoring the
autonomy of art could possibly be given in
a Fascist or Communist country.

And yet: the ultimate significance of the
FBI’s misguided pursuit of Dwight Macdonald
for libertarians and conservatives
today is not the tiresome point that the
U.S. intelligence services are a contradiction
in terms, let alone that Macdonald is a
forgotten literary burnout. Rather, it is first
that we Americans need to remain wary of
official rationales for invading our privacy,
invariably in the name of “national security”
or “patriotism” or even “the public
good.” ⁴ Equally important is the freelancing
style of Macdonald—in life as well as in
literature. For if ever there were an “individualist”
whose eclectic career amounted
to its own one-man “Individualist Studies
Institute” ⁵—it was Dwight Macdonald.
Czeslaw Miłosz once called him “a totally
American phenomenon in the tradition of
Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville—’the
completely free man,’ capable of making
decisions at all times and about all things,
strictly on the basis of his personal and
moral judgment.” ⁶

It is this Macdonald, the moralist and
outsider, who speaks to libertarians of
our time. His anti-statism, his anarchist
impulse, his Veblerian distrust for the
academy and its pretensions, his impassioned
defense of cultural norms and the
Western literary tradition: these capacities
are indispensable field artillery in the
ongoing culture wars of the twenty-first
century. For all these reasons, Macdonald
should still exert a claim on our interest
and attention today.

II

In the course of circulating fund-raising
letters in late 1943 for politics, Macdonald
caught the attention of the FBI,
which opened another dossier on him and
launched a fresh investigation into his activities.
What especially piqued the FBI’s
interest was the correspondence between
Macdonald and a potential contributor to
the magazine, Victor Serge, whose real
name was Kibalchich. The Bureau believed
that Macdonald was trying to arrange for
Serge to settle in the United States. Serge
was an ex-Communist and prolific author
whose rejection of Stalinist orthodoxies
and fierce commitment to democratic
socialism had rendered him persona non
grata in the Soviet Union. Although the
independent-minded Serge was a fearless
critic of the claim by the Bolshevik state to
represent revolutionary socialism, the FBI
regarded him as a dangerous subversive to
keep out of the U.S. at all costs. He was
living in Mexico when Macdonald contacted
him about contributing an article
to politics. The FBI was compiling a list of
writers who represented national security
threats, and Macdonald’s name joined that
growing number.

The Bureau’s probe of Macdonald’s
activities intensified in 1944. With a bureaucratic
mix of clumsiness and thoroughness,
the Bureau carried out a background
check on Macdonald—spelling
his name incorrectly as “MacDonald”
or “McDonald” even after he became an
internationally recognized writer. They
also began to monitor his mail; copies
of Serge’s letters to him can be found in
Macdonald’s dossier. Checking the magazine’s
office, the Bureau discovered to its
surprise that politics‘ entire staff consisted
of just three people: Macdonald; his wife,
Nancy; and a secretary/assistant, Dorothy
Frumm. The Bureau even launched an
investigation of Frumm; it yielded nothing
of significance.

The Macdonald file serves as an ironic
commentary on the FBI of the mid-twentieth
century, exposing a huge blind spot
when it came to the Bureau’s surveillance
of the American Left. The Bureau tended
to equate everyone on the Left with Communism,
since few agents were familiar
with the immigrant origins and European
context of radical politics in America.⁷
The FBI viewed anyone with a liberal or
radical past as suspect for tolerating Communists
and defending their constitutional
rights. The Macdonald file reflects little
awareness of the internecine warfare that
raged within the American Left. The lasting
impression is a sense of bewilderment
on the part of various agents as they try
to disentangle the complex connections
among rival left-wing groups. Macdonald’s
dossier possesses significant historical
and political value, for it offers a revealing
glimpse of the vicissitudes of postwar U.S.
intellectual life—from the veiled side of
the government intelligence services—as
the American Left lurched along in turmoil
during World War II, through the
Cold War, and into the era of the Vietnam
War protests.

III

In a letter dated 26 January 1944, J. Edgar
Hoover ordered a full-scale investigation
of Macdonald and his new journal. On 6
April 1944, the New York office of the
FBI filed a report entitled “Dwight Macdonald
alias McCarthy.” The name Mc-
Carthy had already appeared occasionally
in the FBI reports on Macdonald, indicating
that their agents claimed he was a
well-known Stalinist in Washington, DC,
in 1937. Periodically the FBI would record
the possibility that Macdonald was (to
use the then-current phrase of the day) “a
card-carrying member of the Communist
Party.” The source for this myth was an
informant who had read (and misunderstood)
Macdonald’s magazine.

The FBI seldom took these reports at
face value. And yet, the very claim that
Macdonald (“alias McCarthy”) was a
Washington, DC, Stalinist operative in
1937 reflects the Bureau’s confusion about
American radical politics. In 1937, when
Macdonald was supposed to be agitating
for Stalinism in the nation’s capital, he
was living in New York and embroiled
in literary politics, devising strategies and
tactics with his fellow Trotskyists for seizing
Partisan Review from the Stalinists who
had founded the magazine in 1934 and still
controlled it. He also was involved that
year with John Dewey’s American Committee
for the Defense of Leon Trotsky,
which was challenging the accusations
against Trotsky emerging from the Moscow
purge trials—scarcely the activities
one would associate with a Stalinist.

It is not apparent whether the FBI ever
cleared up its NY/DC “Doppelgänger
Dwight” identity confusions. Toward the
end of Macdonald’s file, however, which
closes in the early 1970s, the references to
him as a “Communist” dwindle. Nonetheless,
the mix-up attests to the FBI’s
uncertain grasp of the nature of the wartime
and postwar American Left.

The April 1944 report also includes an
up-to-date thumbnail biography of Macdonald:
his various residences, his financial
status, the names of his wife and children,
and a review of the first two issues
of politics.

Subsequent reports gained from what
the FBI called “confidential informants
whose identity is known to the Bureau”
dispute the contention that Macdonald was
a Stalinist or Communist sympathizer. One
informant told the FBI that not only Communist
Party orthodoxy repelled Macdonald,
but also that he could not abide even
the milder variant among Trotskyist sects.
Indeed he could not stomach the shibboleths
of Soviet ideology, especially after
the start of the war in September 1939 and
Trotsky’s murder the following August.
The informant stated that Macdonald “left
the [Socialist] Workers Party in 1941 because
he could not accept Bolshevism in its
original form. He believed that Leninism as
practiced in Russia had failed and believed
a Socialist revolution unlikely but thought
that new ways and means would have to be
devised in order to accomplish it.” ⁸

Other examples of Macdonald’s opposition
to Stalin’s Russia also were gathered
from FBI informants. They noted that he
had been arrested for disorderly conduct
(30 August 1940) outside the Soviet Consulate
in New York for protesting Stalin’s
alliance with Hitler.

Another “confidential informant” told
the FBI that Macdonald was secretary of
an organization including influential anti-
Stalinist leftists (such as James T. Farrell,
Sidney Hook, Norman Thomas, and Edmund
Wilson), which was created to protest
the 1943 pro-Soviet film Mission to
Moscow, a Hollywood drama designed to
strengthen the wartime alliance with “Uncle
Joe.” Based on the memoirs of Joseph
E. Davies, ambassador to Russia from 1937
to 1939, Mission to Moscow was a full-scale
whitewash of Stalin’s crimes and his purge
trials. The film also rationalized the Nazi-
Soviet Pact of August 1939 as a step forced
on Stalin by the West.⁹ One would think
Macdonald’s anti-Soviet stance would have
satisfied Hoover that politics represented no
real threat to the nation’s security. It also
should have alerted the Bureau to the complexities
of American intellectual radicalism
and some of the distinctions between
the anti-Stalinist Left and the Stalinist Left
at this time.

Unfortunately, it did not. The Bureau’s
agents stayed on Macdonald’s case. They
even took out a subscription to politics
“through a confidential mail box maintained
by the New York office.” Macdonald
would probably have been gratified to
learn that the Bureau was a paid subscriber,
given that politics struggled throughout its
five-year history and never gained more
than 5,000 subscribers.

The FBI’s assiduous monitoring of the
wartime politics unearthed no juicy scandals
or bombshell revelations. Much of the
magazine’s anarchist-pacifist, anti-capitalist,
and anti–New Deal editorial line
seemed unexceptional to FBI agents. Still,
the FBI was puzzled by Macdonald’s leftwing
anti-Communism especially during
the war years, when the USSR was a valued
ally. FBI agents continued to deliver
periodic reports of politics‘ contents, all of
which they forwarded to the main office
in Washington. Hoover found nothing
much of interest.

IV

That all changed in the postwar years.
Macdonald commissioned an article in
1947 on Hoover and the FBI by a freelance
writer, Clifton Northbridge Bennett, a
self-declared anarchist and pacifist. Hoover
was thin-skinned about even discreet private
criticism, let alone public castigation
of the Bureau; he made strenuous efforts
(with considerable success) through his PR
machine to ensure that only positive stories
appeared.

By the early postwar era, Hoover’s close
working relationship with leading Washington
politicians of both parties and with
the nation’s print barons and broadcast media
newsmen guaranteed a constant stream
of welcome reports about his intrepid Gmen.
One reason was that Hoover also had
enjoyed “a good war.” To glamorize the
FBI’s round-up of Nazis or pro-Nazi sympathizers
in the United States, Hollywood
added to Hoover’s aura with a highly successful
film about the break-up of a Nazi
espionage gang in New York: The House on
92nd Street (1945). Hoover was so pleased
by the film that he entered into a deal with
Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox
studios to make a film every year based
on FBI cases. The two men soon clashed,
however, and the project fell through.

So the last thing Hoover wanted was for
some muckraking, fellow-traveling Commie
editor with a Leninist (or Trotskyite?)
goatee and his hireling hack writer digging
up dirt on him and his beloved Bureau—
and then publishing it in their un-American
scandal sheet. Macdonald and Bennett,
however, were not intimidated by the FBI’s
reputation or cowed by Hoover’s publicity
machine. In April 1947, Bennett wrote
to Hoover requesting an interview for his
forthcoming article. Hoover was suspicious,
refused to grant the interview, and then ordered
that Bennett be investigated. The ensuing
inquiry riveted the FBI’s attention on
politics once more.

The Bureau report on Bennett uncovered
that he had been arrested by the FBI in
1945 for draft-dodging and spent more than
a year in jail before being released in December
1946. The report also asserted that
Bennett was officially connected to politics,
though FBI agents weren’t yet certain just
how. In fact, he was writing his exposé of
the Bureau as a freelancer. The Bureau’s report
also noted that Bennett toured the FBI
facility in Washington in 1947 and subsequently
asked to meet with an FBI agent. At
the meeting he asked a number of searching,
uncomfortable questions that aroused the
suspicions of the agent, who immediately
drew up a report and sent it to Hoover.

How Hoover dealt with unfavorable
publicity can be gauged from the fact that
the FBI thereupon contacted Bennett’s parole
board to see if there was any evidence
to recommit him to prison. The parole
board rejected that step on the grounds
“that persons of Bennett’s type would welcome
this type of action and would therefore
consider themselves martyrs.” ¹⁰ The
New York office told Hoover that Bennett’s
research agenda was to write “another
smear attack against the Director.” ¹¹
Even gossip columnist Walter Winchell,
then at the height of his popularity and
quite cozy with Hoover, entered the fray.
He got wind of Bennett’s article and had his
secretary forward a copy to Hoover—and
received a “Dear Walter” letter of thanks
from the Director.

Hoover’s ire was now aroused. In an undated
memo (written in late 1947 or early
1948) Hoover ordered Bureau agents to
“keep an eye on MacDonald [sic] and his
publication. He must have resources to put
this out. He could easily be used by Commies
even though he may claim to be pacifi
st.” The FBI also checked the funding of
politics to determine if any Stalinist front
organizations were financing the journal.

Hoover was apparently convinced that
politics was a Stalinist front, a complete
misreading of Macdonald and his magazine.
Why the Bureau thought that Stalinists
would back Macdonald—at a moment
when politics was publishing a series of bitter
assaults on Stalin’s Soviet Union—is
mystifying. Did they deem the series a
clever ruse, an instance of Stalinist machinations,
or an attempt at a disinformation
campaign? Or was it another mini-version
of a nascent Popular Front strategy that
would unite Stalinists with anarchist-pacifi
st intellectuals? Macdonald’s dossier furnishes
no clear answer.

Shortly after the Communist coup in
Czechoslovakia in February 1948, Mac-
donald adopted an even harsher anti-Soviet
line. He began castigating Henry
Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential
candidate, as a Stalinist dupe. Some of
Macdonald’s politics columns on Wallace appeared
in Henry Wallace: The Man and The
Myth (1948), a fierce polemic that dismissed
Wallace and his supporters as Stalinist hacks.
Evidence of Macdonald’s vociferous anti-
Communism and anti-Stalinism, which
occasionally emerges in the FBI reports,
never registered with Hoover, however—
and even less so after Bennett’s article appeared
in the Winter 1948 issue of politics.
It represents a classic case of how out-oftouch
the FBI was with the postwar leftwing
scene in America.

Bennett’s article, “The FBI,” is a sustained
critique of the Bureau. Written in
plain prose, it traces the development of
the FBI under Hoover’s leadership since
1924. Bennett implies that Hoover built
his reputation falsely, even noting that his
law degree was conferred without a written
thesis. Bennett also points out that
most of Hoover’s articles and books, which
Bennett describes as “lurid, alarmist, and
imaginative with regard to fact,” were
ghosted by a professional writer, Courtney
Ryley Cooper. Here especially, Bennett
hit a raw nerve with the publicityconscious
Hoover.

If that weren’t enough to rankle Hoover,
a section of Bennett’s article bore the title
“Gestapo in Knee-pants.” Comparing the
FBI to the Gestapo made Hoover apoplectic.
Bennett also cast doubt on two of
Hoover’s proudest accomplishments. First,
Bennett claimed that Hoover had exaggerated
his role in the arrest of Louis Lepke,
the head of Murder Inc. Second, he contended
that the Nazi saboteurs who landed
in New York had not been hunted down
by an FBI dragnet, but rather had simply
been betrayed by one of their own.¹²
Hoover was incensed. But he granted that
there wasn’t much he could do about politics—
or, for that matter, wasn’t much that
he needed to do. Short of funds, politics was
appearing sporadically; with its circulation
declining, it was near collapse.

V

Shortly after the appearance of Bennett’s
piece in politics in 1948, the FBI’s New
York office informed Hoover that Macdonald
was planning to close down the
magazine in early 1949. After this report,
Macdonald dropped off the FBI’s radar
screen. He had in any case become disillusioned
with the political scene and was
now preoccupied with the world of culture,
where he would focus his attention
throughout the next decade, supported by
his well-paid position as a freelance writer
with the New Yorker.

Although his name would occasionally
surface on one of the FBI’s periodic investigations
of American left-wing movements
in the 1950s and ’60s, the FBI lost interest
in Macdonald during these years: he was
not on any FBI watch list or their Security
Index. Nonetheless, he still surfaced occasionally
in FBI reports as a “Communist”
or Communist Party member—the
FBI reports failed again and again to sort
out intelligibly the plethora of socialist
factions, wings, and sects. One frustrated
agent wrote Hoover that conducting interviews
with members of the SWP and
other Trotskyist groups was difficult, because
they “tend toward argument”—an
understatement that Macdonald would
likely have affirmed with his trademark
response on hearing such amusing ignorance:
a loud and long guffaw.¹³

Throughout the 1950s, the FBI collected
Macdonald’s articles from both the
New Yorker and the London-based Encounter,
for whom he wrote occasional pieces.
But they found little that interested them.
Hoover had forgotten him. In an April
1958 letter to the FBI’s New York office
about a negative review in the New York
Times of his latest book, Masters of Deceit,
Hoover noted that the name Dwight Macdonald
was mentioned in passing in the review.
“Who is he?” queried the Director.
So much for the lasting impression that politics
and Macdonald had made on the FBI a
decade earlier.¹⁴

The biting review of Hoover’s book in
the New York Times, with its reference to
Macdonald, triggered yet another investigation
of “subversive” intellectuals. The
FBI gathered up its old dossiers on Macdonald,
but the only new information entered
into his file concerns his role in protesting
the pro-Soviet Conference on World Peace
in March 1949—generally known as the
Waldorf Conference, because it occurred
at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. In
its report the FBI describes Macdonald as
a well-known “anti-Communist.” They
note that his questions from the floor “attempted
to turn the Conference into an
anti-Soviet inquisition.” ¹⁵

Macdonald’s name crops up periodically
in FBI reports of the 1950s and
’60s, primarily when he traveled abroad.
For instance, in the mid- and late 1950s,
his trips to England and Argentina were
tracked by the Bureau—though, here
again, the FBI agents discover little of interest.
Macdonald’s name turns up also in
connection with the campaign to secure
clemency for Morton Sobell, who was
convicted in the Rosenberg spy case. But
Macdonald’s peripheral role didn’t seem
to concern Hoover.¹⁶

VI

What did get under Hoover’s skin and
drew the Bureau back to Macdonald’s case
in the 1960s was another act of Macdonald
bravado that exposed the gap between
FBI publicity and reality. Once again, the
circumstances highlight how sensitive the
Director was when it came to his public
image.

The occasion was Macdonald’s slashing
review in the March 1962 Esquire of a film
sympathetic to the FBI, Experiment in Terror.
Released by Columbia Pictures, directed by
the highly regarded Blake Edwards, starring
Glenn Ford and Lee Remick, and produced
with the cooperation of the San Francisco
FBI office, the film purported to show how
the Bureau caught a bank robber and kidnapper.
The film was a popular and critical
hit. But Macdonald, characteristically,
remained unimpressed. He found the film
simplistic, nothing more than another exercise
in Hollywood hagiography, a madeto-
order product aiming to beatify the FBI.
In their report to Hoover on the Esquire
review, the FBI agents noted that Macdonald
“does not like the movie. This is of no
concern to us except that Macdonald uses
the occasion to viciously criticize the FBI.”
One line from Macdonald’s review surely
ruffled Hoover’s feathers: “It has been clear
to me for a long time that J. Edgar Hoover is
as adept at public relations as he and his Gmen
are inept at actual detective work.” ¹⁷

So Macdonald was checked out—yet
again. The Bureau retraced the same old
ground, but this time Macdonald stayed on
the FBI’s radar, if only intermittently. This
monitoring coincided with Macdonald’s
renewed interest in U.S. politics, especially
electoral politics. Macdonald was undergoing
yet another sea change in his personal
and professional life as the 1960s opened.
He found his political interests revived in
the new decade by the Vietnam antiwar
movement and the student power movement.
Now in his sixties, Macdonald was
radicalized by these twin causes, both of
which Hoover was convinced were controlled
by the Communists.

For Macdonald, the 1960s became a
heady replay of the 1930s. Macdonald admired
the actions of the student protesters
who closed down colleges, occupied professors’
offices, and marched in pro–North
Vietnamese demonstrations. Suffering from
a severe writer’s block and drinking heavily,
he bristled on hearing expressions of
worry from family and friends. Angrily declaring
himself “an alcoholic, damn it,” he
embraced the Movement, finding a radical
cause again, responding to an inner voice
calling him to mount a new barricade in
the name of Revolution. Macdonald also
came to the attention of the FBI briefly in
another context in the mid-1960s. The Bureau
was asked to investigate him in 1965
when President Johnson decided to hold a
White House Festival of the Arts that June.
Oddly, Macdonald had been placed on the
guest list. It turned out to be a major mistake
on Johnson’s part to invite Macdonald,
who cleverly exploited the event as a highprofi
le opportunity to militate against the
war by gathering signatures for an anti–
Vietnam War statement. Of course, from
the point of view of the White House and
those sympathetic to America’s conduct of
the war, Macdonald spent his visit making
a general nuisance of himself. ¹⁸

Macdonald had displaced his prodigious
critical energies into antiwar activism: his
return to the radicalism of his youth was
largely an attempt to distract himself from
his literary impotence and dependence on
the bottle. Already by the mid-1960s, and
even more in the 1970s, he found it nearly
impossible to complete any intellectual
projects he had undertaken—and his journals
show that he lacerated himself mercilessly
for this failure. He wrote very little
of any consequence during his last dozen
years. In 1967 he gave up reviewing movies
for Esquire to write a monthly political
column; it soon petered out. Instead, he
began teaching at various colleges and universities,
which gave him a perfect excuse
for reneging on his prior literary commitments
and declining new assignments.

Why were antiwar activism and college
teaching not enough to fulfill Macdonald?
By all accounts, he was an excellent
teacher. Beginning in 1956, he taught both
at major universities and at commuter campuses,
among them Northwestern University,
Bard College, the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, the University
of California at Santa Cruz, the University
of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Hofstra
University, the State University of New
York at Buffalo (for several semesters), and
John Jay College of the City University of
New York. When he taught in 1966 at the
University of Texas at Austin, as a “Distinguished
Visiting Professor” (with feigned
patrician pretentiousness, he delighted to
cite his academic title), he was sometimes
the only faculty member at campus rallies
sponsored by the local SDS. Excited
to listen to Esquire‘s movie critic discourse
on contemporary cinema, the students enjoyed
his course on film history. Both the
Daily Texan and the Austin American-Statesman
were filled with reports of his political
pronouncements—and several Daily Texan
pieces featured him on the front page.

But this was not enough. For Macdonald’s
fundamental identity was that
of a writer. He regarded teaching as a
sideline—he was “like a tennis bum” at
universities, he felt, because teaching was
“more output than input”—rather “like
mining, an extractive industry,” not a
productive activity such as farming or
manufacturing. As he wrote in one journal
entry in the 1970s:

I am a writer and I must keep in contact
with my mother earth, or like
Antaeus I begin to die. If character
is destiny, MY character is a monochrome=
100% writing.¹⁹

Macdonald’s letter to a Wisconsin
friend, written during one of his frequent
rounds of seeking a visiting professorship,
was revealing: he wanted desperately to
teach because his flow of written words
was “dammed to a trickle.” ²⁰ And Macdonald
damned himself for that. He demanded
from himself “100% writing.”
And so—like Antaeus—he began to die.

Nobody was tougher on Macdonald’s
unproductivity than Macdonald himself.
By contrast, his editors and publishers were
far more understanding. This was the case
even though, by the mid-1970s, Macdonald
seldom delivered on a writing commitment—
not the study of mass culture, not
the book on Edgar Allan Poe, and above
all not his long-planned intellectual autobiography.
It was all due to his “Bartleby
neurosis,” he told one scholar in 1973, as he
backed out of a promise to write a preface
to her critical study of Poe, explaining (in
his biographer’s words) that he “could not
write anything more than a letter—and
not many of them either.” ²¹

The coup de grace had been quietly delivered
a few months earlier. In 1972, a
supremely patient William Shawn, editor
of the New Yorker, finally insisted that the
lovable “Dwight” relinquish his office;
Macdonald had written nothing in the
magazine for nearly a decade.

Macdonald’s participation in the protest
movement of the 1960s was his way
of investing his life with a new, enlarged
significance. But he was just a peripheral
figure in the protest scene as far as the FBI
was concerned. Its file on him grew thinner
as the decade advanced.

The FBI recorded Macdonald’s antiwar
agitation of the 1960s, but he was mentioned
only in passing. For instance, when
fifty people marched out in protest against
a 1967 speech by Vice President Hubert
Humphrey before the National Book
Conference, the Bureau noted that Macdonald
was among the protesters. Later, in
December 1969, along with Dr. Benjamin
Spock, Macdonald participated in an antiwar
march on the Department of Justice.
Once there, he beseeched young men to
turn in their draft cards as a form of protest.
FBI agents investigated him once
again—this time for draft-dodger organizing—
but decided that since Macdonald “is
not a member of any basic revolutionary
group, no recommendation is being made
at this time for inclusion of his name in the
SI [Security Index].” ¹⁸

Ironically, it was the same old story as a
decade earlier: “Who is he?” Macdonald
couldn’t ever get the FBI to take him seriously
for very long. And so, doubtless much
to his disappointment—if he had known—
Macdonald quietly faded from the FBI’s
attention after 1970, much as he also did
from the national intellectual and literary
scenes. Sporadically memorialized by the
publications on which he had once served
as a mainstay, he died in December 1982
of congestive heart failure, largely a forgotten
man. His fame had passed long ago. He
was an old-fashioned libertarian deemed
no longer relevant—neither to his herd of
fellow New York intellectuals nor even to
the FBI agents who snooped on them all.

VII

Not unlike George Orwell, therefore,
Macdonald was a political radical yet a cultural
conservative. He would have agreed
with Orwell that “the slovenliness of our
language makes it easier for us to have
foolish thoughts.” ²³ Macdonald’s essays
bemoaning the faddish modernized revisions
of the King James Bible, the turgid
prose of Mortimer Adler’s Synopticon, and
the jargon-laden rhetoric of Vice President
Henry Wallace all reflected his well-justifi
ed contempt for lax or slipshod prose.
He was a cultural conservative because he
fought to preserve the canons of English
usage and the traditions and norms of literary
excellence.

Particularly in these respects, Dwight
Macdonald serves as a model and mentor
for cultural conservatives today. And yet,
his ideological follies—which point to the
yawning gap between him and Orwell
in terms of political acumen and intellectual
legacy—stand also as a warning to
contemporary conservatives. (Here, too,
Macdonald fl ummoxed FBI agents—and
his gloried inconsistencies and instinctive
antinomianism kept them, doggedly
if confusedly, on his case.) For in his celebration
of the counterculture of the 1960s,
which extended even to enthusiasm for the
Yippies and for the student demonstrators
who occupied professors’ offices and closed
down colleges—Macdonald undermined
the very traditions and norms of excellence
that he otherwise championed.

Such misjudgments represented a political
and moral surrender that has had longterm,
disastrous consequences. For the
counterculture of the 1960s has given rise
to the anti-intellectualism that currently
pervades the American academy, which has
witnessed the ascendancy of intellectually
fashionable theories such as multiculturalism,
postmodernism, and post-structuralism.
Beyond all this, that decade marked
the beginning of the eclipse of serious print
culture by the pop cultures of video and
MTV. Today lowbrow taste and debased
language infest our cultural life. One encounters
them everywhere, vomited by an
indolent, sensation-seeking media whose
barrages of images and sounds displace the
written word. The outcome of all this slovenliness,
as Orwell feared, is a zombie-like
state of shallow thinking bereft of introspection:
“the gramophone mind.”

So Macdonald’s career is both an exemplar
and an omen for us today. It is unsurprising
that the FBI, whose agents were
seldom versed in the details of internecine
warfare within the sectarian Left, let alone
in the nuances of New York intellectual
debates, did not comprehend such a nonpareil
individualist as Macdonald. They failed
to appreciate how he was—if not “A Good
American”—indeed “A Critical American”
(in his phrases).²⁴ They failed to appreciate
how his stance “against the American
grain” (in his 1962 essay collection of that
title)²⁵ steadfastly maintained critical support
for the U.S. They failed to appreciate
the value of his libertarian vision, especially
his trenchant critiques in politics of both liberalism
and totalitarianism.

Yet conservatives today can and should
appreciate all this about Macdonald. Above
all, we need to keep alive the unbowed critical
spirit and lonely intellectual courage,
notwithstanding his sometimes unfortunate
political judgment and misplaced social idealism,
that Dwight Macdonald exemplified
at his best. And his best—in his politics and
his politics, as he both lived it and wrote it—
was very good indeed. It remains a summons
and inspiration for concerned citizens
today.

NOTES

1. The definitive biography of Macdonald is Michael
   Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and
   Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books,
   1995). See also the collection of Macdonald’s letters edited
   by Wreszin, A Moral Temper (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
   2001).

2. Cited in Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers:
   Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors
   (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988).

3. See Irving Howe
   and the Critics, ed. John Rodden (Lincoln, NE: University
   of Nebraska Press, 2004) and John Rodden, The
   Worlds of Irving Howe (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005).

4. Fast-forward from Macdonald’s case to the present:
   If FBI agents have traditionally lacked the competence
   to comprehend the parties and issues on the American
   Left, imagine: how much trouble—linguistically and
   culturally, as well as politically—must they doubtless
   currently face when it comes to investigating alleged
   post-9/11 threats posed by diverse Arab and Muslim
   groups?

5. Readers of Modern Age and other ISI publications
   will doubtless recall that the Intercollegiate Stud-
   ies Institute was originally named the Intercollegiate
   Society of Individualists. The organization was founded
   under the latter title in 1953 and was rechristened
   the former in 1966.

6. Miłosz expressed this observation
   in his review of the 1953 edition of Macdonald’s The
   Root Is Man, originally published in 1946 and reprinted
   as a pamphlet. See Miłosz’s Beginning with My Streets:
   Essays and Reflections, quoted in Gregory D. Sumner,
   Dwight Macdonald and the politics Circle: The Challenge
   of Cosmopolitan Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University
   Press, 1996).

7. See John Rodden, “Lionel Trilling
   and the FBI,” Shofar, Winter 2008 and John Rodden,
   “Wanted by the FBI: Irving Howe a.k.a. ‘Irving Horenstein,’
   ” Dissent, Winter 2002.

8. Report on Dwight
   Macdonald, 6 April 1944. Bureau File (a.k.a. Bufile)
   100-268519-8.

9. Ibid.
10. New York to Hoover, 3
    September 1947. Bufile, 100-268519-SAC.

11. Tolson
    to Hoover, 23 April 1947. Bufile, 100-268519-C. Attached
    to this memorandum is a notation in Hoover’s
    handwriting, “Let us make a discreet investigation of
    this outfit.”

12. Bennett, “The FBI,” politics, Winter
    1948, 19–26.

13. New York to Hoover, 20 December
    1957. Bufile, 100-268519-70, SAC.

14. New York to
    Hoover, 4 April 1958. Bufile, 100-268519-74.

15. A. H.
    Belmont to L. V. Boardman, 6 April 1958. Bufile, 100-
    268519-75. Macdonald’s report on the Waldorf Conference
    can be found in the April 1949 politics. It was
    reprinted in the London journal Horizon the following
    month. For an overview of the Waldorf Conference,
    see John P. Rossi, “Farewell to Fellow-Traveling: The
    Waldorf Peace Conference of 1949,” Continuity: A Journal
    of History 10, Spring 1983, 1–31.

16. Memorandum
    for Hoover, 31 January 1961. Bufile, 100-268519.

17. A. Jones to C. DeLoach, 5 November 1962. Bufile,
    100,-268519-80.

18. For Macdonald’s role at the White
    House Conference on the Arts, see John Rodden and
    John Rossi, “Kultur Clash at the White House,” Kenyon
    Review, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, Fall 2007, 161–81.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Memorandum from SAC
    (Special Agent in Charge) New York to Hoover, 30
    April 1970. Bufile, 100-268519-92.

23. See George
    Orwell, The Orwell Reader (London: Harcourt Trade,
    1956).

24. Dwight Macdonald, “A Critical American,”
    Twentieth Century, December 1958.

25. See Dwight
    Macdonald, Against the American Grain (New York:
    Random House, 1962).