Politics (journal) - Dwight Macdonald: Culture As Politics - and Politics As Culture

and Politics As Culture

As a prototypical "one-man magazine", Politics bore the sensibility and characteristic preoccupations of its founding, and sole, editor, the literary and polemical journalist Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), whose cantankerous past in the face of institutional authority of all kinds furnished a fitting prologue to his six-year tenure in the editor's chair. After his undergraduate years at Yale - during which he gained early notoriety for his critique in the student newspaper of William Lyon Phelps, a pillar of the university's English faculty, and a lecturer and media figure with a national following - and a brief stint in the Executive Training Squad at the R.H. Macy department-store company, Macdonald landed a position as a writer and associate editor in 1929 at Fortune, the business monthly launched the year of the American stock market crash by Henry Luce, a Yale alumnus eight years Macdonald's senior whose stable of iconic magazines had begun in 1923 with Time. Exposure to the many captains of industry whose works and ways he profiled, set against the deepening Depression, sharpened in him a disdain for capitalism which made common cause with an elitist, aristocratic artistic sensibility that admired the classical European past as a sustaining and shaming foil to what he saw as the cultural degradations attendant upon the ascendancy of mass society. As a result, much of Macdonald's outwardly political criticism would take puckish aim at one or another of the stylistic infelicities, whether verbal or in manners, of the reigning pundits and politicians of the day, along with a critical tendency, somewhat like that of an earlier journalistic-literary "rebel in defense of tradition" (to borrow the title of Macdonald's biographer Michael Wreszin), H.L. Mencken, more characteristically negative in tenor than constructive, programmatic or partisan - Mencken's claim that "one horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms" might well have been Macdonald's own.

Upon leaving Fortune in 1936, after a dispute over his epic four-part profile of U.S. Steel one of whose crescendoes was an epigram from Lenin on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, he immersed himself in the works of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, a schooling which, against the backdrop of the Moscow Trials and the bitter divisions over their authenticity across the American left intelligentsia, led him to side with the Trotskyist faction against the Stalinists. The New York social critic Paul Goodman, whose early essays in Politics seeded his flowering into mainstream fame twenty years later, famously asserted that Macdonald "thinks with his typewriter," a restless, perpetually self-revising (and, often enough in rueful retrospect, self-mocking) quality that saw Macdonald studding the later book versions of his magazine essays with a sort of after-the-fact Greek chorus of second thoughts, self-recriminations and liberal, as it were, doses of l'esprit de l'escalier, that lent his writing a quality one critic labeled "stereophonic."