Macdonald, Dwight

Dwight Macdonald was born on March 24, 1906 in New York City. He graduated from Yale University in 1928 (B.A.). He served as associate editor of Fortune Magazine (1929-1936) and editor of the Partisan Review (1937-1943). Macdonald joined the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist Party), and was a member from 1939-1941. He published numerous books, articles, and essays in addition to publishing a journal, Politics, from 1944-1949. He also wrote for Esquire and The New Yorker, and published Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1956), which was reissued in 1970 as Politics Past. Macdonald died on December 19, 1982 in New York City.

Dwight Macdonald has been for almost fifty years a productive and influential critic of politics, society, and culture in the United States and abroad. He is especially well-known for his writing on film, mass culture, and political ideas, but few subjects of humanistic interest have altogether escaped his attention. At different times he has written regularly for Fortune, Partisan Review, The New International, Politics (which he also edited and published), The New Yorker, Encounter, and Esquire, and his articles have appeared occasionally in dozens of other periodicals. Among his longer works are The Root is Man: A Radical Critique of Marxism, "Masscult and Midcult," several volumes of essays, studies of Henry Wallace and the Ford Foundation, editions of Edgar Allan Poe and Alexander Herzen, and an anthology of parodies. He has also been an important member and critic of a number of political movements and organizations, ranging in time from the Socialist Workers Party in the late 1930s to the anti-war movement in the late 1960s. Since 1948 he has also lectured and taught courses on film, mass culture, politics, and other subjects in colleges and universities.

An education at Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale (B.A., 1928) provided Macdonald with a strong background in classical literature and reinforced his tendency to rely on his own taste and knowledge as his final measures of value. This self-assurance and skepticism shaped both his early approach to radical politics and his later ventures in cultural criticism. Experiences at Yale, in particular, foreshadowed the characteristic Macdonald protest: in a 1925 letter to President James R. Angell, he argued against compulsory chapel on the ground that the sermons offended his intelligence.

In the 1930s, along with many other disenchanted American intellectuals, Dwight Macdonald read Marx and turned to communism. In 1934 he wrote that he believed it to be the "only way out of the mess our society is in. Whether it's a blind alley is another question but it's the only alley that has any chance of not turning out to be blind." But unlike the majority of those who took this path, he affiliated himself with the Trotskyists rather than the Communists. A leading intellectual in the Socialist Workers Party from 1939 to 1941, he left the Party in the later year because of its lack of internal democracy and intellectual freedom.

Macdonald argued with the Trotskyists over organization and not ideology, but by the time he published "The Root is Man" in 1946, he had completed an ideological break as well. Applying a single measure to politics and culture, he criticized either when it offended his intellect or the principles of his conservatism. Later in the 1940s, when he reflected on his involvement with the Trotskyists, he described the experience with a metaphor that recalled Exeter and Yale: "It really is like the old school tie, this having once been part of the Bolshevist Movement, and no matter how much one's reason and ethical values tell you now otherwise, one still has a sense that one 'belongs to the club.'"

During the Politics period (1944-1949), Macdonald made a transition from socialist politics and literary criticism to anarchism, pacifism, and a broader critique of American culture. This period prepared him for the articles he would write in the 1950s and 1960s for Esquire and The New Yorker essays that retained his earlier concern for social reform and human welfare but defined culture in more elitist terms. He saw the job of a critic as more than reviewing or providing a consumer report on culture. Rather, he would insist on principles and standards; he would evaluate according to his taste and knowledge. He would undertake to distinguish between true culture and the insidious pseudo-culture ("mid-cult") of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Great Books, and The Saturday Review .

Macdonald carried on his defense of principles and morality in culture by insisting on standards of taste and usage in language. Believing that language determines and reflects the strength and level of culture, he sought a balance between style and content. If, as he wrote in 1960, "Great ideas can only be expressed in a great style,"* content and style might serve as mutual upholders of culture. Radical politics (content) and conservative culture (standards of style and taste) coexisted for him in the medium of language.

Macdonald's left-handed attack on American politics and his right-handed critique of American culture have earned him the reputation of being "against" everything and not "for" anything. By way of this distinction, he further. aided the cause of precision in language in an indirect way. A new term, descriptive of his type of criticism, bears his name: macdonaldize, v.i. to find fault, carp.

*"A note on Style," Dissent (January 1960).

CHRONOLOGY

These are among the principal events in Dwight Macdonald's personal and public life: