A Family Portrait

The American Radical as Type is still fair game for anyone who wants to write about American History without being blamed for it. He's an ideal beast to track, since any snare laid for him will yield something, if only a few toenails and a tuft of hair. The hunters can return to town with the news that he just got away, the assumption that there is such a composite creature secure and even vindicated. The Hofstadters and the Goldmans have all fiddled extensively with his natural and social environment, and it has remained for Christopher Lasch to lead us through his kitchen and attic and gently draw back the curtains on the family's cranky four-poster.

Which is to say that the subtitle of Mr. Lasch's book, "The Intellectual as a Social Type," has mercifully little to do with the contents. Given a subject so frequently the victim of over-generalization. The New Radicalism in America is commendably wary of the old cliches, and if it were not for annoyingly frequent allusions to The New Radical, I would be tempted to read it as a series of thoughtful, charming, and often brilliant intellectual portraits of those who have found American society just too much to take at face value.

The family, to continue the metaphor, is an unhappy bunch. Jane Addams is Mother in her youth, struggling to forge a synthesis of culture and politics-elements that for another generation were efficiently joined in religion. Her father's ghost keeps advocating piety without religious belief, so Jane, while touring Europe, throws up culture as not worth the price and conceives Hull House, the exemplary instance of human relations saturated with politics. Randolph Bourne is a lamentably deformed younger son who seeks to regain his identity at the neighbors' soirees in Greenwich village, but "to his dismay, he discovered that the girls who talked so convincingly about the 'human sex' were not interested in the art of personal relations." Mabel Dodge Luhan is a crazed and slightly nymphomaniacal auntie whose cultural and sexual cravings were never thoroughly straightened out. And D. H. Lawrence stalks through the story like a sinister foreign uncle, admonishing Mabel to "try, above all things, to be still and to contain yourself!"

Mr. Lasch grounds his initially biographical approach on the Hegelian premise that "history is the record of consciousness" (anybody's consciousness) and on a mass of largely unexplorel family records: the Bourne and Addams papers. But as the opportunities for original research decrease a complex and rather obliquely stated thesis emerges. In the late 19th century, when most of the early reformers were growing up, the American family as an instrument of repression was almost extinct, leaving the young intellectuals with no firm social structure to rebel against. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because Jane Addams was not the daughter of an overbearing Breueresque daddy, the Freudian discovery of the inner self did not breed a characteristically European pessimism when it reached these shores, but instead sparked the effort to recover a lost state of bliss, a pre-adolescent Eden that had never felt the dead hand of patriarchal restraint. What developed instead of a sense of cosmic fatalism (and its consequent strain of apocalyptic rebellion, one supposes) was an exaggerated respect for social manipulation, a penchant for forcing youth and growth into accepted social channels. Addams, Ben Lindsey, E. A. Ross, and John Wewey looked forward to conditioning the individual mind to a degree that far surpassed the plans for their European counterparts. "For the New Radicals, conflict itself, rather than injustice or inequality, was the evil to be eradicated." Thus every emotion became subtly politicized-witness Bourne's young feminists or Mabel Luhan's flirtations with Lawrence-and the New Radical (sorry), in an effort to best his environment, confused politics with culture and corrupted culture with politics.

Mr. Lasch is not knocking his subjects for their naive assessment of human nature, although this charge is implicit in any discussion of Dewey and Deweyites. He raps them on a more basic matter: for their incomplete participation in the revolution in standards and for developing a brand of moral relativism that was constitutionally incapable of taking a stand against the encroachments of power. "The new radicals were torn between their wish to liberate the unused energies of the submerged portions of society and their enthusiasm for social planning, which led in practice to new and subtler forms of repression."

This is a hasty summary, and I have extrapolated where Lasch's occasionally disorganized remarks leave the reader guessing. But it should be seen that The New Radicalism in America is a work of derogation, something of a native La Trahison des Clercs-far subtler than the original, it should be noted, since the author has no overt interest in recriminations, but still committed to puncturing the American self-consciousness where it hurts. Mr. Lasch intelligently sidesteps the more frequently trodden paths: stories of the dispossessed who mooned in Europe with Harold Stearns, then returned to claim their inheritence with Malcolm Cowley after the Crash; tales of the flagellants who during the '30's stood in awe of greasy Communist bosses and parroted Granville Hick's latest decoctations of Stalin on Proust.

The domestic, the conventional evidence is damning enough. There's fascinating account of the New Republic's vascillating attitude toward World War One, presenting the dilemma of a magazine that simply couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a liberal government's House-organ or a conservative administration's shrill and ineffectual opponent. There's a fine chapter on Colonel House himself, the intellectual pimp of Wilsonian progressivism, and his relations with the journalist Lincoln Colcord. Lincoin Steffens is taken to pieces for walking into his "scientific" study of corruption with pretty clear notions of what he was going to find, then kindly put back together again for the, "humility" he apparently evinced at the end of his life after his conversion to Communism. It might aid the case for the "politicized emotions" theory if the author had read the last selection in Steffens' collected letters (edited by Hicks and Ella Winter) which was addressed to the Communist Party rally in San Francisco in 1934:

I come down to earth, here, on this carefully spot-before this crowd of willing to the only crowd that must act-I can come here and point out to you... and to my fellow-American citizens a scientific cure for all our troubles. It is Communism.

As well as being arrogant, Steffens was a drastically uncultured man, and I suspect Mr. Lasch uses "culture" as nothing more than the definiendum of That-which-identifies-the-intellectual.

Mr. Lasch skips over the '30's in a few pages, in pleasant contrast to Daniel Aaron's agonizing redundancies in Writers on the Left. C. Wright Mills and Benjamin Ginzburg are praised for defending the autonomy of culture against the depredations of those who called for Commitment. But Mr. Lasch is far more interested in the failings of the '40's and '50's, and perhaps it is here that he is most illuminating. He notes that the post-Marxist "realist" school of political analysis, fathered by Niebuhr on Kennan, Morgenthau, Charles Osgood, Louis Halle, and John F. Kennedy, has based most of its concept of America's world role on the European situation, where the possibility of imperialism is understandably slight. Btu in the undeveloped world? Mr. Lasch hints that the old Marxist analysis of world politics, against which Niebuhr and Sidney Hook reacted so violently, might have more application than we thought. "It was widely said that Latin America, Cuba in particular, was the 'blind spot' of the Kennedy administration, otherwise liberal in its foreign policies. What was not generally appreciated was that Latin America was the blind spot of the new realism as a whole, to which the Kennedy regime was so heavily committed for its ideas about international affairs." Mr. Lasch winds up firmly in opposition to those who have opted for a purely bipolar world.

Dwight MacDonald and Norman Mailer are traced through checkered careers. The one seems to be taken as representative of the '50's in his withdrawal from politics, the other typical of the Kennedy years in his admiration for the charismatic leader and his well-bred wife who together were to wed culture and politics, or their contemporary analogues, Broadway and Route 128, in an apotheosis of disciplined Power. Mailer's existentialism is in fact not too far from the old notion of "expressive politics" which the New Republic implicitly championed for years: commitment for the sake of commitment, action for its internal, rather than external consequences. One could have seen Mailer as a grudging admirer of Teddy Roosevelt.

And what of Vietnam and Santo Domingo? The New Radicalism necessarily stops short of the teach-in movement, but the cast of characters has not changed radically. Mailer rants, Stone pleads, and gadfly MacDonald flits through the President's arts festival taking signatures on an anti-war petition. One might imagine that the radicals, if such they are, are hugely relieved to be once again in unqualified opposition to a hostile government and not cursed with the opportunity, however slight, of realizing the megalomaniacal tendencies that Mr. Lasch detects but does not name. Praise God, the autonomy of "culture" is at least temporarily secure.

I think the chase of the Questing Beast breaks down for lack of game, but the by-products of Mr. Lasch's journey are plentiful and fascinating. Given a thesis just vague enough to apply to anybody, we begin to realize that he's writing about, Americans, not just intellectuals; the pathological tone of earlier writings on the subject has disappeared, and a thoroughly entertaining act of scholarship has been committed.

(Stuart A. Davis '67 is editor of the Harvard Advocate, the College's literary magazine.