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early fifties, when Cohen told him that whatever kind of revolutionary
Howe thought himself to be, he really had a "social-democratic tempera–
ment." It was, Howe remembered, one of those transforming moments of
recognition that he had long resisted. And to his successors, he tried,
sometimes fruitlessly, to impart this same message.
In the new postwar world, having left the Leninist sects of his youth,
Howe founded
Dissent,
which was to become his final legacy to the
world.
It
was in its pages, as well as in those of
Partisan Review
in the
1950s - a decade, Howe wrote, of "suffocating complacency" - that he
was to make his mark. The very introduction of his journal made a point
he had made in these pages: America had to come out of an "age of con–
formity," wherein Howe warned intellectuals against accepting the en–
trapments of power and thereby abandoning their function as intellectuals.
Unlike others around him, Howe warned that the intellectual atmosphere
of freedom was "under severe attack," and that meant no temporizing to
McCarthyism in any of its manifestations. By tying the intellectual and the
journal to the newly emerging civil rights movement and to other cur–
rents of change,
Dissent
itself came to symbolize the promise of a new
epoch.
At a critical juncture in the early Cold War, Irving Howe realized
that for all its imperfections - some of which he most of all was keenly
aware of - the West faced a justifiable and serious danger from the Soviet
Union. At a time when the bulk of the so-called "left" was still mesmer–
ized by the remnants of the wartime Popular Front in the guise of Henry
Wallace's "Progressive" movement, Irving Howe argued time and time
again that the fear of Communist power was well founded; that were
Stalinism to win, the most precious values of the West would be de–
stroyed. That meant one had to support both the Marshall Plan and the
forces of liberal anti-Communism in Europe - precisely those forces
which the international left was dubbing the agencies of American im–
peralism.
It
was precisely his anti-Communism, however, which allowed
Howe to respond forcefully at yet another critical juncture: the birth of
the 1960s New Left. Howe and his associates had worked tirelessly for the
reemergence of a left rooted in the American democratic culture. But
when the New Left rose from the ashes, it reeked of anti-Americanism
and a rather crude Marxism, and its young adherents tended to romanti–
cize and support any third world dictatorship whose leaders used the
rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism. Howe looked at this New Left and, re–
flecting on his own generation's bitter experience, saw a new version of
the old "after Fascism - us" of the Third Period Communists. In a critical
