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Articles by Irving Howe
Leonard Bernstein's Radicalism - Dissent Magazine
Leonard Bernstein’s Radicalism Bernstein used his status as a public figure both to popularize classical music and to support civil rights, the antiwar movement, and other political causes. ▪ February 2, 2024 Bradley Cooper’s new biopic Maestro is masterful in many ways. Cooper embodies Leonard Bernstein’s persona, his dramatic conducting style, his many talents, and even his voice and looks.
Ragged Individualist | Irving Howe
The main thing wrong with The Last Romantic is that Mr. O’Neill can’t tell a story. Here is his opening sentence: “Max Eastman was not Jewish, despite his name, Jewish first wife, radical enthusiasms, and graduate training at Columbia University.” An array of tonal, historical, and moral gaucheries marches forth, clause by clause: no, it’s not the equal of “Call me Ishmael.” Eastman’s life ought to make a good story. He was born in upstate New York in 1883.
The Communist Collapse
Subscribe Magazine Online Blog Podcasts Events Store Login About Us Donate Contact Advertise Newsletter The Communist Collapse Irving Howe ▪ Fall 1991 __ SEPTEM 1’IER 7 ,1991 • he remarkable events in the Sovie t Union since the failed coup of August IS- remarkable both for the depth and rapidity of change-make it almost reckless 10 venture a serious comment as we prepare this issue of Dissent for the press. But if the risks are great. so is the temp tation.
Universities and Intellectuals
Universities and Intellectuals Irving Howe ▪ Winter 1964 Schools reflect a culture; they do not transform it—Unsigned review, The New Yorker, November 16, 1963. A university should not be a weather vane, responsive to every variation of popular whim. Universities must at times give society, not what society wants, but what it needs— Abraham Flexner, Universities: American, British, German. There could not be a sharper contrast.
The Prosecution of U.S. Communists
The Prosecution of U.S. Communists Irving Howe ▪ Winter 1963 With the fatality of opportunism, the government is pursuing its prosecution of the Communist Party under the McCarran Act of 1950. After 12 years of harassment, it is now within striking distance and may again succeed — some triumph! —in putting Gus Hall and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn into jail.
Memory Hole - Dissent Magazine
Memory Hole Irving Howe ▪ May – June 1970 This carefully laundered selection from the cultural journal of American Stalinism during the 1930s has been put together by one of its early editors, one of the few who never kicked the totalitarian habit.
Poor Richard Nixon
Two specimens of light reading have been just been offered for the entertainment of the American electorate. One is, to waste no words, Nixon, by ralph de Toledano. This Is Nixon by James Keogh is the other. Both authors presumably share Mr. Eisenhower’s delight that Richard Nixon will stick with the team in ‘56. Duty compels him to run again. To characterize these two biographies of our Vice President, one must say more than that they are bad.
Finding Babel in the Drawer
My father, Irving Howe, wrote this essay on Isaac Babel in the late 1980s, so far as I can tell, as the introduction to a book of Babel’s stories that Patricia Blake had planned to edit. The book was never published, and my father apparently tucked the introduction away in a drawer in his apartment. At the time of our father’s death, in 1993, my brother, Nick, began to collect the unpublished essays that subsequently appeared in the posthumous A Critic’s Notebook.
A Profile of a Political Demagogue
Howe Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page Irving Howe Vito Marcantonio’s Rise to Power From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 47, 25 November 1946, pp. 3 & 6. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). On the night before election, in the heart of East Harlem – that polyglot slum where poverty-stricken Puerto Rican and Italian families crowd into tiny apartments – there was a large mass-meeting.
PR | Irving Howe
Little magazines are born quickly and die easily, two respects in which they differ from most human beings. For a literary journal like Partisan Review to have survived a quarter of a century is equivalent to a man passing the age of a hundred: he looms as a triumph of the life principle, no matter how wrinkled or bent he may now be.
Short Shorts by Irving Howe, Ilana W. Howe: 9780553274400
Before you go... Check Out The Bestselling Books of All Time See the List Buy the Mass Market Paperback: People Who Read Short Shorts Also Read ‹ › Inspired by Your Browsing History People Who Read Short Shorts Also Read Inspired by Your Browsing History Close Download Hi Res Short Shorts Buy Now Mass Market Paperback Jan 01, 1997 | ISBN 9780553274400 Buy Back to Top Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network
I.H. How Stalin "Saved" the Polish Jews ... (February 1948)
Howe Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page I.H. (February 1948) From Labor Action, Vol. 2 No. 6, 9 February 1948, p. 1. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL). One of the most frequent defenses which American Stalinists offered for the Hitler-Stalin pact was that when Stalin marched into Poland he thereby saved thousands of Jews from falling into the hands of Hitler.
The New York Intellectuals
The New York Intellectuals Irving Howe ▪ October 1, 1969 Irving Howe, Stanford University, 1962 The social roots of the New York writers are not hard to trace.
The Culture of Modernism
In the past hundred years we have had a special kind of literature. We call it modern and distinguish it from the merely contemporary; for where the contemporary refers to time, the modern refers to sensibility and style, and where the contemporary is a term of neutral reference, the modern is a term of critical placement and judgment.
Daniel Bell at 100
Daniel Bell at 100 Bell never quite reconciled the Jewish conservative and the Yiddish radical within him. This tension helped generate some of his most important and creative insights. ▪ May 9, 2019 I always regret that my father, Daniel Bell, who would have turned 100 on May 10, did not write memoirs. In the early 1990s, I spent a long time trying to persuade him to do so.
Stevenson and the Intellectuals (Winter 1954)
Stevenson and the Intellectuals (Winter 1954) Stevenson and the Intellectuals (Winter 1954) Irving Howe ▪ August 1, 2008 Reprinted from Dissent magazine, Winter 1954 (Issue 1) FOR AMERICAN radicals these are not times of easy political choice. They are all the more difficult if we continue to think in terms of elections, candidates and parties.
This Age of Conformity
1. The Smith Act, passed in 1940, was a loosely worded piece of legislation that made it unlawful to “conspire to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” 2. It must in honesty be noted that many of the intellectuals least alive to the problem of civil liberties are former Stalinists or radicals; and this, more than the vast anti-Marxist literature of recent years, constitutes a serious criticism of American radicalism.
13 Powerful Books About Immigration
News about immigration policy and tragic stories about impacted individuals have recently dominated news outlets. Families seeking asylum are being separated at the US-Mexico border. Children are being thrown into overcrowded, understaffed glorified detention centers. Parents are being deported without their children. On June 20th, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at ending the separation, but it will not immediately—if at all—reunite the families that have already been separated.
Philip Roth Reconsidered
When Philip Roth published his collection of stories, Goodbye, Columbus, in 1959, the book was generously praised and I was among the reviewers who praised it. Whatever modulations of judgment one might want now to propose, it is not hard to see why Roth should have won approval. The work of a newcomer still in his twenties, Goodbye, Columbus bristled with a literary self-confidence such as few writers two or three decades older than Roth could command.
Images of Socialism
Images of Socialism At so late and unhappy a moment, can one still specify what the vision of socialism means or should mean? Is the idea of utopia itself still a tolerable one? Lewis Coser and Irving Howe ▪ Spring 1954 “God,” said Tolstoy, “is the name of my desire.” This remarkable sentence could haunt one a lifetime, it reverberates in so many directions.
Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?
Especially in Europe, liberalism has signifed those movements and currents of opinion that arose toward the end of the 18th century, seeking to loosen the constraints traditional societies had imposed on the commercial classes and proposing modes of government in which the political and economic behavior of individuals would be subjected to a minimum of regulation.
SOCIALISM AND AMERICA
Six discerning if occasionally discursive essays from a veteran sociopolitical and literary critic, which go a long way toward explaining why democratic socialism has thus far failed to take root in the US. Under the charismatic leadership of Eugene V. Debs, American socialism peaked in 1912; the party's presidential candidate attracted 6 percent of the popular vote, and more than 1,000 members held public office. Six years later, Howe recounts, the movement was in shambles.
Ernest Hemingway and the Conquest of Panic
In his very first stories Hemingway struck straight to the heart of our nihilism, writing with that marvelous courage he then had, which allowed him to brush past received ideas and show Nick Adams alone, bewildered, afraid and bored, Nick Adams finding his bit of peace through fishing with an exact salvaging ritual in the big two-hearted river.
Robert Frost: A Momentary Stay
In his long poems most of them uniting satire and didacticism, Frost is at his worst. An early long poem, “New Hampshire,” foreshadows the sly folksiness that would later endear him to native moralists, lady schoolteachers, and miscellaneous middlebrows. The verse is limp; the manner coy; the thought a display of provincialism. In the least happy sense of the word, the poem is mannered: Frost catering to his idiosyncrasies and minor virtuosities.
The Democratic Vista, by Richard Chase
AT A time when so many American intellectuals have been turning to conservatism, the literary critic Richard Chase has moved… Culture and Radicalism The Democratic Vista. by Richard Chase. Doubleday. 180 pp. $3.95. At a time when so many American intellectuals have been turning to conservatism, the literary critic Richard Chase has moved in the opposite direction.
This Age of Conformity
This Age of Conformity ▪ January 1, 1954 1 Intellectuals have always been partial to grandiose ideas about themselves, whether of a heroic or a masochistic kind, but surely no one has ever had a more grandiose idea about the destiny of modern intellectuals than the brilliant economist Joseph Schumpeter.
Why You Absolutely Should Read the Canon in College
Skip Navigation TNR_brand monogram_blackThe New Republic TNR_brand wordmark_black I. Of all the disputes agitating the American campus, the one that seems to me especially significant is that over “the canon.” What should be taught in the humanities and social sciences, especially in introductory courses? What is the place of the classics? How shall we respond to those professors who attack “Eurocentrism” and advocate “multiculturalism”?
The Dark Side of Austrian Social Democracy
The Last Page You go shopping and find yourself in a long line, waiting for help from a competent but overwhelmed cashier. On your right you see four self-service stations with no lines. A cashier stands ready to train you on how to … The Troubles of Daniel There is a political sensibility—it can be found in the pages of The Nation, though elsewhere too—that might roughly be called “the troubles and confusions of the children of Stalinism.” Children literally, children figuratively.
THE DECADE THAT FAILED (Published 1982)
Sept. 19, 1982 Credit...The New York Times Archives See the article in its original context from September 19, 1982, Section 6, Page 43Buy Reprints TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
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