Renewed Radicalism
Primarily a writer for The New Yorker, Macdonald also published more than thirty essays and reviews in The New York Review of Books. His most famous and influential review, of Michael Harrington's The Other America helped to spur the Kennedy Administration's War on Poverty. A reprint of Macdonald's Politics elicited a brief introduction by Hannah Arendt in the New York Review of Books on 1 August 1968.
Later still, he opposed the Vietnam War and defended many student radicals of the 1960s like the Columbia University students who organized a sit in, during which university property and a professor's research was destroyed. In 1968, he signed the pledge of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest”, vowing to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the Vietnam War.
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Famous quotes containing the words renewed and/or radicalism:
“The treasury of America lies in those ambitions and those energies that cannot be restricted to a special, favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men; upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)