Alfred Kazin and the FBI

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The first Stevenson joke, of course, is an allusion to the famous like in Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. The second joke rephrases Lenin's notorious remark about the need for tough disciplinary measures and hardline Realpolitik toward “counterrevolutionary” troublemakers, especially intellectuals: “You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

² The complete file was declassified and released on 14 December 2005.

³ I have written at length about the files of Macdonald and Howe. See, for instance, John Rodden, Of G-Men and Eggheads: The FBI, the New York Intellectuals, and the Cold War (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

⁴ See Richard Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 8.

⁵ See John Rodden, The Intellectual Species: Evolution or Extinction? (London: Troubador Press, 2017).

⁶ For instance, Alan Wald informs me that Kazin got involved with the Berkeley chapter of the League of American Writers around 1935, which was essentially communist. He also attended their meetings several times during this period, which was after the beginning of the Moscow Show trials. Moreover, Kazin's close friend, the future historian Richard Hofstadter, was a YCL activist and joined the CP in 1938. Kazin completely misrepresents this affiliation in his recollections of their friendship, as recounted in his two memoirs, Starting Out in the 1930s (1965) and New York Jew (1978).

⁷ Similarly, Lionel Trilling's much lengthier file expanded enormously because of his personal connection with Whittaker Chambers and the fact that his novel, The Middle of the Journey, included a character based on Chambers. Here it warrants mention in light of the Yaddo connections that Chambers’ grandson, David Chambers, believes that The Middle of the Journey is “more biographical than assumed to date.” David Chambers argues that the character Arthur Croom is modeled on Sidney Hook, who was “a leading Marxist academic in the 1920s and 1930s” when Trilling first met him at Yaddo and that he became “Lionel and Diana Trilling's Communist guru in the 1930s.” The couple met Hook at the Yaddo artist community in 1931 and temporarily converted to what Diana refers to as “the New Revolutionary Faith: Communism.” David Chambers further adduces evidence that Nancy Croom is based on Hook's first wife, Carrie Katz. These speculations are interesting, but their basis seems slight. Unlike Arthur Croom, the prototype of a liberal fellow-traveler, Hook in the early 1930s was a passionate aggressively argumentative ultra-Red. Moreover, unlike Nancy Croom, a patronizing liberal, Carrie Katz was a political zealot and communist true believer.

Although Hook was never close to Kazin, let alone his “guru,” Kazin did have close relations with communists at Yaddo such as the novelist Josephine Herbst, a vocal admirer of Stalin who was well-acquainted with Whittaker Chambers in the mid-1930s during his communist underground years. (Reportedly her husband, John Herrmann, introduced Chambers to Hiss.) Kazin was a lifelong friend of Herbst (and a lover of Herbst's own longtime companion, the poet Ellen Garrigue). I am surprised that no material from Herbst's FBI dossier appears in Kazin's files.

Whereas David Chambers speculates that Arthur Croom is modeled on Sidney Hook, Trilling himself had mentioned in his introduction to a new edition of The Middle of the Journey [1975]—contrary to critical opinion, then and now—that Arthur and his wife Nancy were not stand-ins for Alger and Priscilla Hiss.

Personal communication with David Chambers, 2009. See also David Chambers’ unpublished manuscript, “From the Depths of Imagination,” September 2011, along with the 1975 edition of The Middle of the Journey, x. Diana Trilling's recollections of Hook are from The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (New York: Mariner Books, 1993), 271--272.

⁸ I believe that he never had any FBI file in the 1930s because the Smith Act was not passed until 1940—and it was not expanded until 1948. Because he had no involvement whatsoever with any revolutionary organizations or communist-front organizations, the FBI would have had no reason to open a file on him before the 1940s. In fact, the 1946 letter attracted the FBI's notice only because a major investigation of Smedley was under way.

⁹ Conduct of Soviet espionage in the USA has become a prominent topic in twenty-first-century scholarship devoted to American communism. Among the best literature on the topic of American communism and Soviet espionage are Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); and Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). See also R. Bruce Craig, Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2003).

¹⁰ On Smedley's activities as a foreign correspondent during the Chinese Civil War and foreign agent for the Soviet Union, see Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). On the investigation of Ames, who in March 1949 briefly became the object of an FBI probe because she had invited Smedley to visit Yaddo regularly since the war years, see Cook, 140.

The poet Robert Lowell, along with three other Yaddo guests (Elizabeth Hardwick, Flannery O'Connor, and the composer Edward Meisel) campaigned for Ames's dismissal as executive director. They were unsuccessful; Ames was no traitor or subversive. Kazin strongly supported Ames, drafted (with Eleanor Clark) a petition in her defense, circulated it among Yaddo guests, and submitted it to the Board of Overseers at Yaddo. Ames was soon reinstated as Yaddo's director.

¹¹ Originally enacted in 1940 as World War II began (and applied to suspected native fascists or Nazis), the Smith Act was first used against the American Left in 1943 (against the SWP) and expanded enormously in 1948 as part of Truman's loyalty program during the Cold War's advance.

Critics of the Smith Act argued that it was an attack on the First Amendment right to free speech, but in June 1951, the act was upheld 6-2 by the Supreme Court. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “These petitioners were not charged with an attempt to overthrow the government…. They were not even charged with saying or writing anything designed to overthrow the government. The charge was that they agreed to assemble and to talk and publish certain ideas at a later date.”

Black's dissenting opinion did little to slow the federal government's dragnet. Federal prosecutors used it to put on trial native-born political radicals suspected of seeking to subvert American institutions and professions. Today, most historians agree that the Smith Act had little to do with a legitimate fear that “revolutionary organizations” were going to overthrow the United States. The purpose was to curtail opposition to the Cold War, whether that opposition came from organized labor, the civil rights movement, or the peace movement. The main victims were left-wing trade unionists. Other legislative tools used to crush leftist dissent were the Taft--Hartley Act, which required all heads of union locals to take oaths swearing that they were not communists, and McCarran Act, which forced party members of “revolutionary organizations” to register with the government.

¹² AK to James Kutcher, 20 December 1953, records of the Kutcher Civil Rights Committee, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. I am grateful to Richard Cook for sharing Kazin's letter to Kutcher with me.

¹³ The FBI report to Johnson also features information that “a confidential informant” furnished the FBI with a February 1962 petition signed by Kazin to grant executive clemency to two men convicted and jailed for contempt of Congress, Carl Braden and Frank Wilkinson. They went to jail for defying HUAC. Braden and his wife were acclaimed by young student activists of the 1960s as the civil rights movement's most dedicated white allies. Wilkinson co-founded the National Committee to Abolish HUAC, which evolved into the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, the organization he led until his death.

It warrants mention that Wilkinson's file, largely because of his aggressive campaign to abolish HUAC, dwarfs Kazin's (and any writer whom I can imagine). Its length is mind-blowing: Wilkinson's dossier totals an unimaginable 132,000 pages.

¹⁴ The 1965 telegram signed by Kazin closes out his FBI file.

¹⁵ “Seldom,” yes, but never say never. William Maxwell's book, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. But it is also true, as I have noted, that most of the files cited by Maxwell pertain to influential creative writers and their works, not the writings of African Americans intellectuals or scholars.

¹⁶ Kazin later published a version of the story, but the joke is a familiar one, and Kazin was just repeating and embroidering it. See Alfred Kazin, “Rewriting the Thirties,” Intellectual History Newsletter, 19 (1997): 50.

¹⁷ Although the slip-ups and shenanigans are indeed sometimes worthy of a Keystone Cops film, they are not necessarily a license for intellectuals to see themselves as victims of persecution (as Howe acknowledged in his own case). Or as Christopher Hitchens remarks—as if to trump Stevenson as a waggish punster—in “The Egghead's Egger-On”: “Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilized man” (London Review of Books, 27 April 2000). The original title for Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was “The Last Man of Europe.” Unless one lived in a society that exhibited some of the features of the Big Brother state in an advanced form, Hitchens believed, it was unacceptable to view oneself as a victimized Winston Smith.

¹⁸ However skewed Macdonald's postmortem on the Festival and about the president's motives, his verdict on its “failure” has also become the consensus judgment of historians—notwithstanding the sardonic crack of Lady Bird Johnson (the Festival's official hostess) on hearing of Macdonald's petition: “I'll take a 397 to 7 majority any time.”

For the hilarious story of his experience, including selections from Macdonald's own FBI dossier, see John Rodden and John Rossi, “Kultur Clash at the White House,” Kenyon Review, XXIX (Fall 2007): 161--182.

¹⁹ For instance, Kazin and his family members were never subject to the invasions of privacy that colleagues such as Irving Howe experienced as a consequence of having been a long-time member of a Trotskyist group and editor of Trotskyist publications such as Labor Action and New International. Indeed, Howe's marriage records, his birth certificate, and his military records were all recorded. One typical report on Howe states: “Information was circulated among the Albany bureau for the marriage records of the state of New York, 15 June 1941 and 12 April 1947. The Newark bureau [was contacted] for marriage records and for activities in Princeton, including divorce records, and the New York and Boston bureaus were also involved.” Yet even Howe would have conceded that the periodic security checks of him and his family represented no more than a dishonorable affront. He always emphasized that, bad as it all was, the FBI's nefarious activities (see, for example, the case of Frank Wilkinson, mentioned in note 13) were utterly incommensurable with Stalin's murder of millions and the genocidal Soviet Gulag. See John Rodden, Of G-Men and Eggheads: The FBI, New York Intellectuals (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017), Chapter 4.

²⁰ On Trilling's short-lived radical past, see also Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

²¹ Fast-forward from the case of Kazin and the PR writers during the Cold War to the present: if FBI agents have traditionally lacked the competence to comprehend the parties and issues on the American Left, imagine: How much trouble—linguistically and culturally, as well as politically—must they doubtless face in the twenty-first century when it comes to investigating alleged post-9/11 threats posed by diverse Arab and Muslim groups?