New Radicalism in America [1889-1963]: The Intellectual as a Social Type

Panopticonman 2002-11-02

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Lasch's "The New Radicalism in America," published in 1965 tells the history of radicalism in America through a series of portraits of well-chosen individuals. Some, such as Jane Addams and Walter Lippmann are still relatively well known, others such as Mabel Luhan Dodge, Lincoln Steffens, Colonel House, and Randolph Bourne as less well-remembered. Part of the appeal of this approach is the how Lasch positions and contrasts these leading and lesser lights within the context of the social and cultural movements they led, followed, or reported upon.

Lasch, the son-in-law of the liberal American historian Henry Commager, belonged to the post WWII generation of historians which searched for more objective ways to tell history than the progressive historians and writers such as Parrington and Croly, and the generation immediately afterwards, for example, Commager. Best known for his "The Culture of Narcissism," the "New Radicalism in America" is the work of a young historian attempting a critique of the grand, sweeping style of earlier generations, and to tell a story of a rise of a new class of personage on the public stage in America: the intellectual.

The intellectual in America rose out of the ashes of Victorianism. Its earliest avatars came from the bourgeoisie, appalled at the stifling, stunted one-dimensional roles assigned to their parents: the father as breadwinner, the predatory male who proved his fitness in the Spencerian business world, the mother who stayed home to create a haven in a heartless world for her husband and children, and who, as such was the arbiter of Victorian genteel culture and the inculcator of the social graces. For the daughters of the last generation of Victorians, such as Jane Addams and Mabel Dodge, the urge to strike through the pasteboard mask of the cult of Victorian womanhood was an almost physical necessity. Addams, observing a bullfight in Spain during a grand tour of Europe, was moved to finally act upon her sense of the emptiness of her position, and taking a cue from the early example of the settlement movement, went back Chicago and set up Hull House. Mabel Dodge, a banker's daughter from Buffalo, set up a salon in Greenwich Village and played the Grande dame to the era's intellectuals, socialists, union organizers, and writers. Going through husbands at a fairly rapid clip, she eventually moved to Taos, New Mexico and managed to get D.H. Lawrence and his wife to come to stay at her retreat. Narcissistic to the core, she embodies the free sexuality of the "new woman," who used the parlor as Victorians would never have used it: as a ring for clashing ideas.

Randolph Bourne, who frequented Dodge's salon along with cultural critics such as Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, John Dos Passos, and Walter Lippmann, wrote about the Young Americans who believed that they could create a new world starting with the new model of public education proposed by John Dewey. He eventually fell out with Dewey over WWI, refusing to accept Dewey's argument that the war was necessary to pave the way for the pragmatic administration of elites who would bring the world closer to a rational state. Bourne comes off here as a prototype of the 60s cultural critic -- rejecting earlier radical's accommodation to power in the Wilson administration.

These new radicals diverged from earlier American traditions of philosophy and religion which tended to either support those in power, or whose criticisms were expressed in the political arena. The post-Victorians attack on the moribund culture they were intended to inherit was truly new. We can see its reverberations today in the emphasis on the cultural critique as the preferred technique of today's post-modernists. These new radicals believed that by destroying the genteel tradition, by discovering and promoting native traditions or importing a more humanistic culture from Europe, they could throw a wrench into the dehumanizing dynamo of American industrialism and the debased high culture which served as the other pole of its debased dialectic.

These histories of intellectuals from the 1960s, such as "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" by Richard Holfstadter, and "Men of Ideas" by Lewis Coser, are the histories of dead white men. They concentrate on telling of the growth of the intellectual class, their repeated induction into puissance and its gratifying perquisites, and their repulsion from power back to the margins. For a book that is now two generations removed from the fashionable currents of today, it remains remarkably fresh. Unlike so many writers of and on history now, who are so throttled by the theory and the malign influence of the first wave of post-modern critics that they do not dare write for a popular audience, Lasch writes to inform, to educate, and to provoke. Those whose retreat into academia a generation later and who generated a self-protective haze of obfuscation over their works, should consider ripping off that pasteboard mask (Melville), and forget their "knowingness." Write boldly. Attack directly. Remember that white males created the discourse in earlier times and that learning about those who rebelled against the narrowness the genteel tradition at the turn of the century in books such as this might actually be of some use in this post-modern era which cries out for political engagement. Read Randolph Bourne.

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