![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Founded in 1953–4, Dissent assigned itself the task of reviving the political criticism that socialism had been articulating for roughly the previous century and a half. Though the magazine largely abandoned Marxism by the end of the decade, Dissent would remain the most durable journal of democratic socialism in the English-speaking world. The first decade of its history coincided with the intensified momentum of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the quarterly certainly expressed its sympathy and support for the struggle for racial justice. But, in retrospect, the infrequency of that endorsement in the articles that were published in Dissent is noteworthy. Perhaps the two most famous articles ever to appear in the magazine nevertheless addressed the issue of race, and yet they did so with an eccentricity that made ‘The White Negro’ and ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ uncharacteristic of the stance of co-founders and co-editors Irving Howe and Lewis Coser. In 1957 Norman Mailer ignored the Civil Rights Movement itself to locate the emergence of a new kind of underground man, a hipster, who drew from the extreme and even violent alienation of the black sensibility to valorize the sensual and emotional at the expense of the rational and the civic. In 1959 Hannah Arendt repudiated the effort of civil rights organizations like the NAACP to desegregate public schools in the South, arguing that the psyches of black children were damaged by seeking to join hostile white children. Public schools, she argued, ought to be regarded as social institutions that permit discrimination. Instead the champions of racial equality ought to concentrate their efforts at eliminating the prohibitions against intermarriage. By the mid-1960s Dissent added its voice to the mainstream of the movement against Jim Crow, even as Howe celebrated black writers who managed to reconcile literary art with the imperatives of political protest.
Notes
1 Irving Howe, ‘A few words about Dissent’, in Voices of Dissent: A Collection of Articles from Dissent Magazine (New York: Grove Press 1958), 11–14.
2 Irving Howe, quoted in Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press 1991), 98. See also Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York: New York University Press 2002), 153.
3 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Trotsky, Orwell, and socialism’ [New Yorker, 28 March 1959], in Dwight Macdonald, Discriminations: Essays and Afterthoughts 1938–1974 (New York: Viking Press 1974), 330–44 (343–4).
4 I. F. Stone, The Haunted Fifties 1953–1963: A Nonconformist History of Our Times (Boston: Little, Brown 1989), 107–13, 204–7, 233–51, 306–8.
5 Irving Howe, ‘Letter to the editor’, Partisan Review, vol. 21, March–April 1954, 239–40 (239); Irving Howe, ‘This age of conformity’ [Partisan Review, January–February 1954], in Irving Howe, Steady Work: Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, 1953–1966 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World 1966), 313–45 (328–9); Nathan Abrams, ‘“America is home”: Commentary magazine and the refocusing of the community of memory, 1945–1960′, in Murray Friedman (ed.), Commentary in American Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2005), 9–37 (35, 36–7).
6 Norman Podhoretz, ‘The issue’, Commentary, vol. 29, February 1960, 182–3; Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House 1967), 294–5; Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 76–8; Sorin, Irving Howe, 110–13, 121, 124.
7 Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1959), 23.
8 Woody Allen, Four Films of Woody Allen (New York: Random House 1982), 27.
9 Macdonald, ‘Trotsky, Orwell, and socialism’, 343–4.
10 Norman Mailer, ‘The white Negro: superficial reflections on the hipster’ [Dissent, Summer 1957], in Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons 1959), 337–58.
11 James Baldwin, ‘The black boy looks at the white boy’ [Esquire, May 1961], in James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Dell 1963), 169–90 (171, 172, 173, 174, 180).
12 Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, ed. Robert Nemiroff (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1969), 198, 199. See also Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: W. W. Norton 2001), 50.
13 Mailer, ‘The white Negro’, 347, 338.
14 Norman Podhoretz, ‘The know-nothing bohemians’ [Partisan Review, Spring 1958], in Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York: Farrar, Straus 1964), 143–57 (157).
15 Jerry Rubin, quoted in Hilary Mills, Mailer: A Biography (New York: Empire Books 1982), 290.
16 Mailer, ‘The white Negro’, 341.
17 Abbie Hoffman, quoted in Mills, Mailer, 291.
18 Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1982), 240; Irving Howe, ‘A quest for peril: Norman Mailer’ [Partisan Review, Winter 1960], in Irving Howe, A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics (New York: Horizon Press 1963), 123–9 (126, 128); Sorin, Irving Howe, 144–5.
19 Mailer, ‘The white Negro’, 356, 338–9, 358.
20 Paul Goodman, ‘A southern conceit’ [Dissent, Spring 1957], in Voices of Dissent, 181–6 (181, 182, 183).
21 Ibid., 184.
22 Ralph Ellison, in Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York: Random House 1965), 334.
23 John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor 1957), 33.
24 L. D. Reddick, ‘The bus boycott in Montgomery’ [Dissent, Spring 1956], in Voices of Dissent, 169–80.
25 Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 106–9; Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books 1987), 109.
26 Irving Howe, ‘Reverberations in the North’, Dissent, vol. 3, Spring 1956, 121–3.
27 Reddick, ‘The bus boycott in Montgomery’, 170, 172, 178, 179; quoted in Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 109.
28 Louis Armstrong, quoted in David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2011), 95, 96, 97.
29 Ibid., 123.
30 Hannah Arendt, ‘A reply to critics’, Dissent, vol. 6, Spring 1959, 179–81 (179).
31 Hannah Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent, vol. 5, Winter 1959, 45–56 (45, 55).
32 See Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 50–1, 52–4.
33 Arendt, quoted in ibid., 55.
34 Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, 45–6 (‘Preliminary remarks’); Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York and London: Penguin 2000), 231; Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 56–7; Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1982), 313–15.
35 Howe, Margin of Hope, 270; Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 57; Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 83–4.
36 Howe, quoted in Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 58.
37 Sidney Hook, ‘Democracy and desegregation’ [New Leader, 21 April 1958], in Sidney Hook, Political Power and Personal Freedom: Critical Studies in Democracy, Communism, and Civil Rights (New York: Collier Books 1962), 114–29 (118, 125).
38 Melvin Tumin, ‘Pie in the sky: a reply’, Dissent, vol. 6, Winter 1959, 65–71 (65).
39 Mailer, quoted in Louis Menand, ‘Beat the devil’, New York Review of Books, 22 October 1968, 27–30 (27).
40 Ralph Ellison, in Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro?, 343–4.
41 Arendt, quoted in Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 58; Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 316; and Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2007), 421.
42 ‘Arendt, Howe win annual Dissent magazine awards’, The Justice (Brandeis University), 2 January 1960, 6.
43 Richard H. King, ‘American dilemmas, European experiences’, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 3, 1997, 314–33.
44 Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, 49 (see also 45–6); Arendt, ‘Reply to critics’, 180, 181; Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt, 236.
45 Andrew Sullivan, ‘The simple logic of Arendt’ (blog), 4 August 2010, and Andrew Sullivan, ‘Marriage and the pursuit of happiness’ (blog), 9 June 2014, both on The Dish website at http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2010/08/04/the-simple-logic-of-arendt and http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/06/09/marriage-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness, respectively (viewed 6 August 2015).
46 Joseph Dorman, ‘The rise of dissent’, Brandeis Magazine, Winter 2014, 4–5.
47 ‘The younger generation’, Time, vol. 58, 5 November 1951, 46–52 (46–7).
48 Sachar, quoted in Sorin, Irving Howe, 101.
49 Dorman, ‘The rise of dissent’.
50 Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 110.
51 Michael Walzer, ‘A cup of coffee and a seat’, Dissent, vol. 7, Spring 1960, 111–20 (111, 112, 118–19, 120).
52 Irving Howe, ‘The Negro revolution’, Dissent, vol. 10, Summer 1963, 205–14 (212); Edward Alexander, Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1998), 120.
53 Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster 1993), 655; Irving Howe, ‘Radical criticism and the American intellectuals’, in Howe, Steady Work, 3–35 (19, 20).
54 Lewis Coser, ‘What shall we do?’, Dissent, vol. 3, Spring 1956, 156–64 (163). See also Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 111–12.
55 Howe, Margin of Hope, 240.
56 Irving Howe, ‘Richard Wright: a word of farewell’ [New Republic, 3 February 1961], in Irving Howe, Celebrations and Attacks: Thirty Years of Literary and Cultural Commentary (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1979), 89–92 (88).
57 Irving Howe, ‘Black boys and native sons’ [Dissent, Autumn 1963], in Irving Howe, Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt Brace & World 1970), 168–81 (174).
58 Ellison, quoted in Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 162.
59 Howe, ‘Black boys and native sons’, 179; Ralph Ellison, ‘The world and the jug’ [New Leader, 1963], in Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Signet 1966), 107–43 (119, 132–3). See also Peter Kuryla, ‘Ralph Ellison, Irving Howe and the imagined civil rights movement’, Society, vol. 50, no. 1, 2013, 10–15.
60 S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 2001), 143; Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1998), 20–31.
61 Kazin, quoted in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 402–3.
62 Ibid., 403.
63 Irving Howe, ‘January 1990′, addendum to ‘Black boys and native sons’, in Irving Howe, Selected Writings, 1950–1990 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1990), 138; Sorin, Irving Howe, 194; Richard H. King, Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2004), 140–4; Howe, Margin of Hope, 257.
64 Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 326–7.
65 Tom Kahn, ‘Problems of the Negro movement’ [Dissent, Winter 1964], in Irving Howe (ed.), The Radical Papers: Essays in Democratic Socialism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor 1966), 144–79 (150, 170, 174).
66 Ana Marie Cox, ‘Bernie Sanders has heard about that hashtag’, New York Times Magazine, 23 August 2015, 54.
67 Sorin, Irving Howe, 189–90; Walter A. Jackson, ‘White liberal intellectuals, civil rights and gradualism, 1954–60’, in Brian Ward and Tony Badger (eds), The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press 1996), 96–114; Polsgrove, Divided Minds, 46–8.
Additional information
Stephen J. Whitfield is Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, where he specializes in twentieth-century American political and intellectual history. He is the author of A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Free Press 1989) and Brandeis University at the Beginning (Brandeis 2010), among other works. His article, ‘The theme of indivisibility in the post-war struggle against prejudice in the United States’, appeared in Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 48, no. 3, 2014.