Dwight Macdonald

Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) was an editor, journalist, essayist, and critic of literature, popular culture, films, and politics.

Dwight Macdonald was born in New York City on March 24, 1906, the son of Dwight and Alice (Hedges) Macdonald. Macdonald attended Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite private school in Exeter, New Hampshire, and Yale University, from which he graduated in 1928. After trying his hand at becoming a merchandiser in a training program at Macy's, Macdonald, with the help of a friend from Yale, became an associate editor in 1929 of Henry Luce's FORTUNE, the first issue of which appeared in 1930. Macdonald worked on FORTUNE until 1936, when he resigned to protest alterations that the pro-business magazine made in a series of articles he had written about U.S. Steel Corporation.

Macdonald devoted himself in the mid-1930s to discovering his own political philosophy. He read Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; became an enthusiastic anti-Stalinist; and, in 1937, became an editor of the radical Partisan Review. Macdonald joined the Trotskyist Party in 1939 and contributed articles to its monthly periodical, the New International. By 1941 Macdonald had broken with the Trotskyists, who had themselves split apart in a bitter factional dispute. In 1943, declaring himself a pacifist and objecting to World War II, he resigned from Partisan Review because of disagreements with its editor, Philip Rahv.

Magazine Editor and Writer

In 1944 Macdonald founded Politics, which appeared first monthly, then quarterly, until Macdonald abandoned it in 1949 to devote more of his time to writing. Politics published essays on politics and culture and included among its contributors James Agee, John Berryman, Bruno Bettelheim, Albert Camus, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, and Simone Weil. As editor of Politics Macdonald began to refer to his own politics as "essentially anarchist."

In 1951 Macdonald became a staff writer for the New Yorker. From 1960 to 1966, while retaining his role on the staff of the New Yorker, Macdonald was movie critic for Esquire.

Many of Macdonald's essays on culture and politics have been collected in books that are interesting both for their intrinsic merits and because they record and reflect the ferment of a generation of American intellectuals whose work spanned the Depression, the "Red Decade" of the 1930s, the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the birth and death of the New Left in the confusions of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Watergate affair, and the rise of neo-conservatism. Macdonald's Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (1948) is a polemic arguing, in effect, that the former New Deal secretary of agriculture and vice president did not deserve the support of the American Left, primarily because of Henry Wallace's professed admiration for Stalinist Russia. (Wallace was the 1948 presidential candidate of the Progressive Party.) Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1957) includes many of Macdonald's most important political essays, including a brief political memoir, "Politics Past," in which Macdonald comments on his Trotskyist period: "What strikes me most, looking back, is the contrast between the scope of our thought and the modesty of our actions."

The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (1956), which originally appeared as a series in the New Yorker, describes the "philanthropoid" as an institutional type and the Ford Foundation itself as "a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some."

A Sharp Critic in Many Areas

Against the American Grain (1962) contains Macdonald's celebrated attacks on James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed, on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and on the third edition of Webster's New International Dictionary. Against the American Grain also contains the famous essay on "Masscult & Midcult," in which Macdonald argues that mass culture is a parody of high culture and that mass culture serves modern industrial society by transforming "the individual into mass man," turning culture into an "instrument of domination" and making "a pluralistic culture impossible." Midcult, on the other hand, is a more recent and sophisticated phenomenon, according to Macdonald. Midcult is as formulaic and predictable as masscult, but pretends to be high culture, which it waters down and displaces.

Macdonald had by now clearly articulated his own fascination with popular culture and his own unwillingness to abandon high culture as a standard against which to judge it. Against the American Grain contains Macdonald's admiring review of Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce and displays Macdonald's characteristic suspicion of academic students of literature—but a suspicion overcome by a genuine and generous celebration of Professor Ellman's work and a convincing perspective on the place of biography in literary studies. Despite his frequent invocations of high culture as a standard of judgment and the wide range of literary learning that is frequently evident in his work, Macdonald produced no large body of critical writing on serious or "high" culture and literature, such as was produced, for example, by Philip Rahv or Edmund Wilson.

Macdonald's film criticism, collected in On Movies (1969), continued to work out his lifelong admiration for movies and his unwillingness to overlook or forgive the mediocre or meretricious. Still, as he said in the introduction to On Movies, "I wouldn't want to see a movie made by a director who had to learn to make movies from my reviews."

Macdonald's writing is learned, conversational, sometimes even chatty, digressive, personal, witty, constantly seeking the apt judgment, the appropriate attitude. William Barrett recalls the New York literary culture in which Macdonald moved as a band of passionate debaters. Macdonald, though he had left the core of intellectuals who formed the Partisan Review crowd, stayed in the debate, but, says Barrett, "he was not very good at argument, for he stammered. In his case the pen—or, rather, the typewriter—was mightier than the tongue; and where in written polemic he could spear his victim with a single deadly phrase or sentence, in oral argument he would become excited and reduced to an incoherent stammer" (William Barrett, The Truants, 1982).

Macdonald cheerfully conceded to Paul Goodman's criticism that he "thought with his typewriter," discovering what he thought by writing it down and revising it. And, as he also cheerfully admitted, he tried to reconcile a fascination for popular culture with a taste formed by high culture and a passionate interest in politics with a growing conviction that collective actions led to diminishments of humankind's essential individualism.

Further Reading

Macdonald's books include Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (1948), The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (1956), Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (1957), Against the American Grain (1962), On Movies (1969), and Discriminations (1974). Greenwood Reprint Corporation reissued Politics in 1968 with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. For discussion of the tradition within and against which Macdonald worked, see William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals (1982), and John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (1975).

Additional Sources

Whitfield, Stephen J., A critical American: the politics of Dwight Macdonald, Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984.

Wreszin, Michael, A rebel in defense of tradition: the life and politics of Dwight Macdonald, New York: Basic Books, 1994. □

MACDONALD, DWIGHT 1906-1982

Magazine editor, political commentator

Iconoclast

In the 1940s Dwight Macdonald was a leading voice of intellectual dissent in America. A writer of satire and biting criticism, he published nearly single-handedly a magazine called Politics, the only American intellectual journal to oppose U.S. participation in World War II. An ardent pacifist, Macdonald also championed equality for African Americans and homosexual rights.

Early Years

Macdonald was born in New York City. His father was a lawyer from a middle-class background, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy Brooklyn merchant. Looking back at his parents' happy marriage, Macdonald later spoke of "the calm, affectionate atmosphere of my boyhood home." Indeed, Macdonald enjoyed a secure, privileged childhood. He attended private elementary schools in New York City, where he began to write, and then went to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he edited the student literary magazine and became class poet. He also helped found a club called "The Hedonists," whose cultural heroes were Oscar Wilde and H. L, Mencken. In 1924 Macdonald went on to Yale University, where he majored in history and continued to pursue his literary interests. He won literary prizes, and edited the Yale Literary Magazine, the Yale Record, and wrote columns for the Yale Daily News.

Working for Fortune

After Macdonald graduated in 1928, he wanted to begin his career as a literary critic, but his father's death in 1926 forced him to provide financial help to his mother. He joined the executive training program at Macy's department store in New York but after six months realized he was poorly suited for retailing. With the help of a friend from Yale, Macdonald got a job as associate editor of Fortune magazine, which was just being launched by Henry R. Luce, another Yale graduate. The magazine flourished despite the stock market crash of 1929, and while Macdonald did not share Luce's uncritical commitment to capitalism, his years at Fortune provided him with a valuable apprenticeship in journalism. Macdonald resigned from the Fortune staff in 1936.

From Capitalist to Revolutionary

Macdonald embraced revolutionary politics in the 1930s as he began reading Karl Marx, Vladimir I. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. He later said of his political evolution, "the speed with which I evolved from a liberal into a radical and from a tepid Communist sympathizer into an ardent anti-Stalinist still amazes me." In 1937, with Philip Rahv, William Phillips, F. W. Dupree, and George L. K. Morris, he helped to revive the leftist literary magazine Partisan Review, which had been founded in 1934 and suspended publication in 1936. Taking an anti-Stalinist position while favoring revolutionary socialism, the new Partisan Review was more politically independent than the old, which had been closely linked to the Communist Party. Macdonald disagreed with his fellow editors at Partisan Review on involvement in World War II, which he firmly condemned, and resigned from the magazine in 1943.

Publishing Politics

In February 1944 Macdonald published the first issue of Politics, a magazine that he owned, published, edited, and proofread. Initially, he was also its chief contributor. According to Macdonald, the aim of Politics was "to create a center of consciousness on the Left, welcoming all varieties of radical thought." In its first two years, Macdonald explained, the magazine "forsook the true Marxist faith to whore after the strange gods of anarchism and pacificism. This was partly a matter of my own evolution…my thinking took its natural bent toward individualism, empiricism, moralism, estheticism." Politics went from a monthly to a bimonthly, and in its five years of existence it published articles of political, literary, and moral opinion. Macdonald stopped publishing Politics in 1949, in part to spend more time on his own writing.

Later Career

Macdonald continued to write for magazines such as The New Yorker, Encounter, and Partisan Review, earning a reputation as a satirist and championing a "radical humanist" outlook based on anti-authoritarianism. Against the American Grain (1962) is a collection of his cultural and literary criticism. In it he criticizes American mass culture, "which thrives not on aesthetic merit, but on marketability." During the years 1960-1966 Macdonald was a staff writer for The New Yorker and movie critic for Esquire. Later in the decade he spoke out against the Vietnam War. He remained a prolific writer and independent thinker until his death in 1982.

Sources:

Stephen J, Whitfield, A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1984);

Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

Dwight Macdonald 1906-82, American author and editor, b. New York City. As an associate editor (1928-36) of the business magazine Fortune he acquired a distaste for capitalism, and in 1937 he became editor of the radical Partisan Review. In the left-wing factionalism of the 1930s and 40s, Macdonald moved from Stalinism to Trotskyism and then to pacifism and to anarchism. In 1943 he left Partisan Review, protesting its support of World War II. As a vehicle for his wry and intensely personal essays he founded Politics (monthly 1944-47; quarterly 1947-49). His works include Henry Wallace (1948), The Root Is Man (1953), and The Ford Foundation (1956). His Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1957) traces his philosophy through his articles. Against the American Grain (1962) comprises his essays deploring the effects of mass culture on the arts, a subject that dominated his later articles. Other collections of his essays and reviews include Dwight Macdonald on Movies (1969), Politics Past (1970), and Discriminations (1974).

Bibliography: See M. Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald (2001); S. Whitfield, A Critical American (1984); M. Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition (1994).

MacDonald, Dwight (1906–82),after graduation from Yale and editorial posts on Fortune and Partisan Review founded his own journal, Politics (1944–49), as an organ of philosophical anarchism and pacifism. His later work on the staff of The New Yorker and as motion‐picture critic for Esquire was more sociological than political. His books include Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (1948); The Ford Foundation: The Man and the Millions (1956); Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1957), essays in political criticism written over the previous 20 years; Against the American Grain (1963), sociocultural essays written from an astringent, minority point of view; The Ghost of Conspiracy (1965), a critique of the Warren Commission's report on President Kennedy's assassination; and Discriminations (1974), political and literary essays.