Howe, Irving

HOWE, IRVING (1920–1993). A prestigious American socialist literary critic of the 1950s–1970s, Irving Howe long remained one of the most controversial figures on the Left. According to his supporters, he was a defender of socialism’s roots in liberal values; to others, he appeared a foremost defender of a socially-constructed “West.” His contribution to the creation of a post-1960s Left may prove to be his major successful political project, although the blossoming of a mass movement of democratic socialists was not realized until a generation after his death.

The child of an East Bronx Jewish proletarian family, born Irving Horenstein, Howe joined the Young People’s Socialist League at an early age and attended the City College of New York, where he became a Trotskyist. Like most other Trotskyist “youth,” he abandoned the Socialist Workers Party in 1940 for the newly founded “Third Camp” Workers Party led by Max Shachtman. The following year, Howe became an editor of the weekly Labor Action, remaining until his departure for military service in 1941 and returning briefly in 1946. Over the next few years, Howe grew increasingly restless in the Trotskyist movement and eased out, turning his attention to mostly literary or cultural essays for liberal, anti-communist journals including the Partisan Review, Commentary, and Time magazine. His memorable polemics included barbs aimed at F.O. Matthiessen, the doyen of American Studies, and popular culture, especially comic books, guilty respectively of Soviet sympathies and degrading Americans’ sensibilities. Appearing in the Partisan Review, his essays merged these subjects as twin threats to democracy and culture.

McCarthyism and the disintegration of the American Left diminished active interest in socialism among Howe’s milieu. Some of the most notable went on to noted careers in the worlds of hawkish liberalism and then neoconservatism. He separated himself from them politically, but continued to share much of their cultural sensibilities. Thereby, he straddled literary-critical pursuits, taking up a wide range of subjects but concerned above all with the “modern,” where aesthetics increasingly transported political judgment into the cultural realm, including the contemporary critique of “conformism,” middle- class material success gone wrong. By the early 1950s, Howe had come to support the United States in the Korean War, albeit critically, and had resigned from the fading Independent Socialist League. He attacked McCarthyism, if not with the degree of vigor that he continued to direct at Communists and the backsliders of his own milieu, while treating the Beat Generation with ridicule. He accepted a position at Brandeis in 1953, launching Dissent the next year, as a voice of liberal anti-communist, democratic socialism.

The American Communist Party, a Critical History (1957), co-authored with Lewis Coser, complements William Z. Foster’s History of the Communist Party USA (1952), the first singularly hostile, the second equally apologetic, but both similarly focused on political positions at the expense of social histories. In the Coser and Howe version, the CP had been essentially a Soviet-guided conspiracy as well as the ruination of the American Left. The Popular Front, with its half-million followers disproportionately Jewish, had been, in this view, an agent of a charade rather than the leftward edge of the New Deal. In the world of Left politics in the 1950s, Howe shunned efforts by A.J. Muste and others to begin a dialogue among socialists, Trotskyists, and former Communists.

Howe continued scholarly work and more popular writing with a variety of literary criticism, including critical biographies of Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson and poet Edward Arlington Robinson, as well as the notable survey, Politics and the Novel (1957). His political essays, meanwhile, sought to define democratic socialism including its relationship with liberalism, and he edited several anthologies of basic socialist writings. His most distinctive work, in collaboration with editor-poet Eliezer Greenberg, helped return Yiddish literature to a certain literary dignity. As anthologist and critic-historian, he offered a popular paean to the past connections of Jewishness and socialism.

Howe returned to New York in 1963 to teach at Hunter College. To his considerable surprise, much of his particular anti-communist style had become an intellectual vogue among an important stratum of liberals. He found himself reciprocally sympathetic, while correspondingly hostile to the New Left as it increased in size and importance. Howe’s insistence, until 1970, upon a US presence in Vietnam, likewise his widely-read polemical attacks on the campus anti-war movement and feminist writers, marked an almost complete break between himself and the New Left.

A key public figure with Michael Harrington in the creation of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), Howe began to move through the 1970s toward an uneasy peace with other sectors of the Left. Howe’s own versions of democratic socialism, often shifting subtly during his career, remained unsettled. By virtue of intellectual alliances and personal ties, he seemed prominently identified with the rightward-turning, hyper-hawkish edge of liberalism in the pages of the New Republic after it was taken over by Martin Peretz. Howe and co-editor Michael Walzer meanwhile sought to make Dissent a loyal opposition to the rising neoliberalism within and around the Democratic Party. Reconciling himself to an alliance with former Communists and New Leftists, Howe blessed the 1982 merger of DSOC and New Left survivor New American Movement into the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The publication of World of Our Fathers (1976) lifted Howe’s popular reputation immeasurably. A large and best-selling work assembled with a team of researchers, it offered a wide view of immigrant Jewish life and culture in the United States if marred by a general erasure of the Communist-leaning Yiddish Left.. In 1987, he received a prestigious fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.

Howe’s literary-critical status declined sharply among younger scholarly generations. His methods came to be considered outdated by newer generations of Marxist, feminist, and Third World critics, as English department students and young professors turned increasingly to the works of Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak among others. Howe nevertheless retained extraordinary prestige in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books as well as the New Republic and attracted a wide but especially Jewish audience outside the academy. Dissent, his institutional legacy, achieved a noted revival with the editorship of New Left veteran Michael Kazin and a host of younger writers. Howe did not live long enough to see the exhaustion of neoliberalism or the return of the popularity of American socialist ideas and of a socialist base generated through the political campaigns of Bernie Sanders and the sharp rise of DSA.

Howe, Irving. A Margin of Hope. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Sorin, Gerald. Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent. New York: New York University
Press, 2003.

Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.