RONALD RADOSH
On
Irving
Howe
Irving Howe was one of our greatest intellects, a man of passion and in–
telligence who epitomized the now-lost world of the 1930s and 1940s
"New York Intellectuals," a term he himself coined in a 1968 essay. He
was by profession a literary critic, who wrote about Celine and Emerson,
and of course, the world of the Yiddish community in which he grew up,
and from which he brought the world's attention to a then-unknown
Isaac Bashevis Singer. But Howe was also a student of culture who could
not separate himself from the turmoil of his own world. As he once put
it, the socialist movement was his school and his university. He grew up
in
its milieu and, until his recent death, never left its ranks.
Future biographers will eventually give us a full picture of Howe's
life. But it is not too early to set out some thoughts about his accom–
plishments and failures. Howe, of course, tried to do this himself, in his
1982 autobiography,
A Margin
oj
Hope.
Herein he presented his own es–
timate of the meaning of his life's course. As usual with Howe, there is
much wisdom to be found in its pages. Howe understood, as so many of
his contemporaries did not, that in the search for utopia lay the seeds of
the totalitarian mentality. Writing about the Spanish Civil War, Howe
reflected on the dire fact that it was a group of brave and idealistic young
American Communists who went to fight for the Loyalist regime, while
others temporized. But in so doing, they became pawns of Stalin's secret
police, which revealed to Howe "the tragic character of those years: that
the yearning for some better world should repeatedly end in muck, foul
play, and murder."
Mter a youthful Trotskyism and a political baptism in the sectarian
world of the late Max Shachtman's Worker's Party and Independent
Socialist League, Howe was to settle into the less dogmatic and more
open world of moderate social democracy. Indeed, he would often say to
me, in my own dogmatic socialist phase as a member of Michael
Harrington's Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and later
Democratic Socialists of America, "Why do you and the others have to
call
yourselves socialists? Isn't social democracy enough for America, in–
deed, isn't that but a remote possibility?" These words, it turned out,
were similar to what Elliot Cohen of
Commentary
had said to Howe in the
