DTNW: Mailer and the New Left (part 1)
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Consider this the first installment of The Dissertation That Never Was (DTNW). I should note that this section was originally intended to open chapter 2, "Norman Mailer and The Crisis of the New Left." My project was structured around the idea that writers who were trying to make sense of the American Left at the end of the 20th century were preoccupied by two historical moments, or "crisis points" as I called them: McCarthyism and the rise and fall of the New Left. Arthur Miller served as my first-person guide to the Eisenhower years in chapter 1. Mailer was my man for the New Left. The rest of the project would have dealt with subsequent historical movements and aesthetic modes. I still think it's a great idea for a project, and my dissertation committee agreed, so if any enterprising graduate student wants to take up the mantle, feel free. I'd love to read it.
I make a couple references here to "Modernization Theory," which is a specific term I borrowed from sociologist Jeffrey Alexander. In a nutshell, it refers to the ideological consensus that characterized much of America during the post-WWII years, a time when our ideology turned on the "romantic" belief that the nation had, in effect, already discovered an ideal social order, "that progress would be more or less continuously achieved, that improvement was likely."
Norman Mailer and the Crisis of the New Left
Arthur Miller would not premiere another new play until January 22, 1964, when After the Fall opened at the Washington Square Theatre. An expressionistic drama that "takes place in the mind, thought, and memory" of its protagonist, After the Fall is a significant departure, both stylistically and ideologically, from Miller's earlier work (1). Like John Proctor, Quentin is a man on trial, but rather than State- or church-authorized judges, his accusers are instead memory and the growing awareness of his own complicity in man's crimes of nature. Loosely inspired by Camus's The Fall, Miller's play suggests a possibility for hope in man's willful decision to act in "good faith" in the existential sense -- that is, by accepting personal responsibility and choosing to live authentically despite life's essential absurdity. When, in the final moments of After the Fall, Quentin walks slowly alongside the conjured ghosts of his past, "magically" freeing them with a smile, it is a self-conscious gesture on Miller's part. Quentin has survived his trial and emerged from it with new understanding, and he is the first of Miller's major protagonists to do so. That its hero succeeds in transcending his historical conditions makes After the Fall a notable artifact from its day, as it reveals the slipping consensus of modernization theory and points to the revolutionary struggles that would follow.
Among American novelists, Norman Mailer was, perhaps, the foremost documentarian of those struggles. In "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," his extended treatment of the 1960 Democratic Convention, he reduces the preceding decades of American life down to an admittedly-simplistic metaphor: two diverging rivers, one on the surface, the other buried deep beneath. "There has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull," Mailer writes; "and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation" (15). For Mailer, the sublimated heroic myth bubbled to the surface only briefly during the 1940s, when World War II accelerated the workings of history and enlisted all of America in a "forced march into a new jungle of emotion" (17). Not surprisingly, Mailer weighs his metaphor with sexual imagery, comparing the world at war to an "orgiastic vista" that was too dangerous and too transgressive to be allowed to stand for long in plain view. Modernization, then, was by Mailer's calculus the inevitable product of American schizophrenia. Faced with the prospects of war in Korea and a potentially-apocalyptic standoff with the Soviet Union, Americans swallowed their mythic desires and took refuge, instead, under the comforting protection of "the General," Eisenhower. And never was America's divided self more apparent, according to Mailer, than during the McCarthy era, when the nation, having retreated once again to conservatism and piety, projected onto Communism all of its own, again-buried traits: "free-loving, lust-looting, atheistic, implacable," he writes (17).
The title of Mailer's piece alludes both to the staid, consumer-driven culture of postwar America -- surely he had in mind Allen Ginsberg's 1955 poem, "A Supermarket in California" -- and to John F. Kennedy, the "Superman" who would cure the nation of its psychic alienation. "The life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far," Mailer argues, and a hero was needed to heal the breach (18). In comparison to Eisenhower, whom Mailer describes as the personification of "security, regularity, order, and the life of no imagination," Kennedy rides into Los Angeles like a "matinee idol," "movie star," and "football hero," all rolled into one (17, 15). Kennedy represents a new type in American politics: he is the "Hipster as Presidential Candidate," an embodiment of Mailer's "White Negro," by turns seductive and terrifying to the nation at large. By virtue of his youth, his heroism in war, his photogenic marriage, and his Catholic otherness, Kennedy's presidency -- even his nomination -- would necessarily tap again into the nation's subterranean Id: "America's politics would now also be America's favorite movie, America's first soap opera, America's best-seller" (21).
Though deeply submerged, the "dream life of the nation" had found articulate expression in several significant sociopolitical movements and cultural voices throughout the 1950s, as Mailer himself acknowledges in his allusions to the mythic code of the Beat. "A horde of half-begotten Christs with scraggly beards," the Beat generation resisted modernization's conformism and found its ethos, instead, in marijuana and music (18). For Mailer, the Beat is more than simply an aesthetic, however; it is, rather, a cultural manifestation of long-repressed desire. "America's need in those years was to take an existential turn," he writes:
to walk into the nightmare, to face into that terrible logic of history which demanded that the country and its people must become more extraordinary and more adventurous, or else perish, since the only alternative was to offer a false security in the power and the panacea of organized religion, family, and the FBI, a totalitarianization of the psyche by the stultifying techniques of the mass media. (20)
Mailer contextualizes the existential ethos of the Beat within the Cold War, arguing that the life of complacent, other-directed consumerism against which the Beat rebelled would, in fact, leave America at a disadvantage in a fight that would surely go the distance (to borrow another of the author's metaphors). "In a competition between totalitarianisms," he writes, "the first maxim of the prizefight manager would doubtless apply: 'Hungry fighters win fights'" (20). For Mailer, Kennedy's nomination signifies a momentous and necessary public acknowledgment of the nation's existential and heroic turn, one that had been forecast for the better part of a decade by leftist intellectuals (Arthur Miller among them) but also by Jack Kerouac, John Coltrane, Elvis Presley, Holden Caulfield, James Dean, and any number of other popular rebels.
Even more significant than the Beat ethos, however, was the civil rights movement, which tore the earliest and deepest rifts in modernization theory. As Mary Dudziak has shown in her study, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, America's foreign and domestic policies during the early postwar years constituted, in regards to race, a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, Washington risked alienating its Western European allies by giving too much ground to a Civil Rights movement that represented opposition to all colonial practices; on the other hand, the movement's outcry against the hypocrisies of America's liberal ideology threatened to undermine the nation's self-appointed "moral authority" on the global stage, and, in fact, America's "Negro Problem" featured prominently in much Soviet propaganda. Adding to the complexity of the issue were McCarthyism, which often equated racial equality with communism (in both rhetoric and policy), and partisan politicking, particularly among southern Democrats. Both factors limited the possibilities of moderation and political compromise. In response, the federal government crafted a simple but consistent story about race and democracy. "The lesson of this story," Dudziak writes, "was always that American democracy was a form of government that made the achievement of social justice possible, and that democratic change, however slow and gradual, was superior to dictatorial imposition." She then adds: "American race relations would not always stay neatly within this frame" (13). And, indeed, the placid tenor of the Truman and Eisenhower years was shaken greatly by, to name but a few of many possible examples: the murder of Emmett Till, the persecution of Paul Robeson, and, most significantly, the forced integration of public schools that followed the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
As Jeffrey Alexander so glibly puts it, at various moments between Kennedy's nomination and the summer of love (1967), "serious 'reality problems' began to intrude on modernization theory in a major way" (19). In addition to the often-violent protests that were exploding the South, President Johnson's "War on Poverty" (1964) acknowledged publicly the failure of free market capitalism to alleviate the sufferings of America's poor. Poverty was also on the rise in many other parts of the world, particularly in postcolonial third world nations throughout Africa and Southeast Asia, where revolution, war, and newly-established authoritarian states refuted modernization's vision of a global flowering of liberal democracy. By the early-1960s, even the fundamental tenets of the Cold War were coming under question. As details of the Bay of Pigs invasion -- and the near miss it represented -- emerged and seeped into the public imagination, "The Bomb," as symbol, became infused with greater ambivalence; by 1963 comedian Lenny Bruce and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove) were among the many who openly mocked the exponential growth of the military industrial complex and the absurd logic of George Kennan's containment policies.
Modernization theory ultimately gave way under the combined weight of these "reality problems" and the social movements they provoked. Alexander echoes Mailer's analysis of four decades earlier, arguing that the challenge that modernization finally could not address was "existential" (21). At all levels of social organization -- local, national, global -- new movements were being born of collective action. Although their spirit never defined the nation's character so thoroughly as did the romantic liberalism of modernization, the civil rights movement, the rise of feminism, and the Beat ethos, now popularly manifest in hippies and rock music, offered a devastating critique of America's ideological consensus. The end result, according to Alexander, is that:
In terms of code, 'modernity' and 'modernization' moved from the sacred to the profane side of historical time, with modernity assuming many of the crucial characteristics that had earlier been associated with traditionalism and backwardness. Rather than democracy and individualization, the contemporary modern period was represented as bureaucratic and repressive. Rather than a free market or contractual society, modern America became 'capitalist,' no longer rational, interdependent, modern, and liberating, but backward, greedy, anarchic, and impoverishing. (21)
In reaction against romantic liberalism, anti-modernization theory offered a renewed enthusiasm for the potential of heroic radicalism. "The present was reconceived, not as the denouement of a long struggle but as a pathway to a different, much better world," writes Alexander. "In this heroic myth, actors and groups in present society were conceived as being 'in struggle' to build the future" (22). That struggle was manifest in various modes of political response: revolution and counterrevolution, class history and consciousness, exploitation and inequality, and state-centered policies such as welfare and President Johnson's Great Society.
In America, these struggles found their loudest and most unified voice (even if that unity was short-lived) in the decade-long effort to end the war in Vietnam, a conflict whose roots were planted in the very principles of modernization. In The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, Anthony Arblaster argues that the Vietnam war was, in fact, the inevitable result of America's global liberalism, and he points specifically to President Truman's announcement in 1947 that "The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms." "In practice," Arblaster writes, this "meant the propping up of each and every anti-communist regime, however unfree it might be" (312). Arblaster's observation is significant, for it draws a direct line of causation through the two crisis points of the Cold War left: from the anti-communist hysteria of the postwar years to the rise and fall of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Birth of a New Left
After spending much of 1961 as a volunteer in the South and in the ghettoes of Newark, New Jersey, 22 year-old Tom Hayden returned to the University of Michigan, where he and nearly sixty other members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) met for four days to discuss politics, the civil rights movement, and their disenchantment with American society. The result of their conference was the "Port Huron Statement," an influential and inspiring, if also idealistic, call for the radical restructuring of America's political and economic processes. Completed in June 1962, the statement outlined a brand of "participatory democracy" that would minimize hierarchies and would make of politics a communal "art" capable of better organizing social relations. Economics would likewise be reimagined with human dignity, rather than profit, as the "essential measure of success." The SDS also used the document to speak out against "the Bomb" and America's commitment to the "Cold War status quo" ("Port").
The "Port Huron Statement" was greeted with great enthusiasm by its target audience: "people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit," as the statement's opening line declares ("Port"). Within months, its spirit had spread throughout the nation. In the fall of 1964, Mario Savio returned to Berkeley, California from Maycomb, Mississippi, where he had been teaching in a freedom school, and discovered that authorities at the University of California, responding to conservative political pressure, had closed off parts of the campus to student activists. With its echoes of HUAC-era loyalty oaths and McCarthyism, the ban ignited a four-month firestorm of public protest, most of it organized by the newly formed Free Speech Movement (FSM). The movement culminated on December 2, 1964, when approximately 1,000 students, accompanied by the sound of Joan Baez singing "We Shall Overcome," occupied Sproul Hall, the administration building. Nearly 800 were taken into custody, making it the largest mass arrest in California history.
The Port Huron conference and the protests in Berkeley represent significant moments of praxis in the early life of the New Left, for the actions of the budding student revolution -- or, at least, of its leadership -- were born of first-hand experience with both the Civil Rights movement and the political theories of a new school of leftist intellectuals. Leftist thought in America had entered a sustained period of flux in the late-1930s, as traditional Marxists became divided by Trotsky, by the non-aggression pact, and by news of the unmistakable human rights catastrophes occurring throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. By the early 1950s, for example, the New York Intellectuals who gathered around The Partisan Review, many of whom had come of age during the old left heydays of the Roosevelt era, had become ardently anticommunist and had found a new ideological home in the liberal center. (Many would, in fact, swing well to the right in later years.) "No version of orthodox Marxism," Irving Howe later wrote, "could retain a hold on intellectuals who had gone through the trauma of abandoning the Leninist Weltanschauung and had experienced the depths to which the politics of this century, most notably the rise of totalitarianism, called into question the once sacred Marxist categories" (219). These former members of the Old Left reestablished themselves, during the Cold War, as prominent cultural critics and academics, embodying, as even Howe would admit, the "increasingly conformist and conservative" tendencies of modernization, and putting them squarely at odds with the younger generation of thinkers and activists who followed (qtd. in Mattson, 26).
The political urgency shared by Hayden, Savio, and the other early leaders of the New Left was born of the racial injustice, poverty, and violence that they witnessed first-hand throughout the South and in American ghettoes. Emboldened by their experience of collective action and free of the messy theoretical and historical entanglements that had tripped up so many earlier adherents to orthodox Marxism, the student movement of the early-1960s took inspiration from leftist intellectuals such as Michael Harrington, C. Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, William Appleman Williams, and Arnold Kaufman, who moved the left away from the language of labor and the proletariat and redirected it, instead, toward "rational and reform-minded political transformation," as Kevin Mattson has written. "They drew less upon Marxism (or a confidence in the working class as an agent of change) and more on the political concept of participatory democracy" (13). Mills was particularly influential in this regard, arguing in his letter to "The New Left" (1960), for example, that any relevant leftist critique must take, as its first target, the alienation and anomie of contemporary, affluent society. "The means of history-making -- of decision and of the enforcement of decision -- have never in world history been so enlarged and so available to such small circles of men on both sides of The Curtains as they are now," Mills writes (255). In many regards, the early student movements were uncanny realizations of precisely the kind of political response that Mills had suggested in White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956), his influential, book-length treatments of late capitalism, the burgeoning middle class, and the "permanent war economy."
Mills died in 1962 and, thus, was prevented from witnessing further developments of the New Left; other leftist intellectuals, however, participated actively in the movement. Kaufman and Goodman, in particular, were present at many critical moments, engaging in theoretical debates the very students in whom they saw their dreams of participatory democracy being realized. Kaufman was in Port Huron when his former student, Hayden, articulated a vision for decentralized social systems that would put greater power in the reach of individual citizens, a vision barely distinguishable from Kaufman's own. Goodman was in Berkeley to report on the Free Speech Movement for Dissent, interviewing the FSM's leaders and praising the "existential" spirit of its cause: "by acting in freedom they made history, and conversely, the historical event made them free" (Goodman, 290). Although both men would later become disenchanted by the student movements' sloppy thinking and countercultural excesses, in the early-1960s they and the rest of the American left were offered a brief glimpse of praxis. Paraphrasing Goodman, Mattson writes: "Movements . . . needed intellect, and vice versa" (144).
Goodman was also in Washington, D.C. in October 1967, when tens of thousands of anti-war protestors gathered to march on the Pentagon. In Armies of the Night, Mailer recounts seeing -- and deliberately avoiding -- Goodman at a dinner party, a habit both men formed (or so says Mailer) after a particular disagreement between them was made public in the pages of Dissent. Mailer admits, begrudgingly, to a certain respect for Goodman, however, particularly for his willingness to speak to college students about the "absurd and empty nature of work and education in America" (24). The university had become one more bureaucracy at the service of America's corporate and military-industrial interests, or so went a common argument among the New Left, and it was precisely this critique that attracted Goodman and Mailer both to the FSM. In his December 1964 speech to the student protestors who would soon be arrested in Sproul Hall, Savio compared their collective actions to the work of the civil rights movement, uniting these separate "battlefields" under the banner of a shared goal: "the right to participate as citizens in democratic society and the right to due process of law." By virtue of its fiery and sustained attack on impersonal, unresponsive bureaucracy -- "the greatest problem of our nation," he calls it -- Savio's speech, "An End to History," would become a defining document of the early New Left.
"An End to History" is a wholly anti-modern speech, a rousing indictment of the "a-historical point of view" occupied by administrators and an equally strident condemnation of the modern education system, which had been retooled in accordance with corporate demands, "turn[ing] out people with all the sharp edges worn off." "The conception that bureaucrats have is that history has in fact come to an end," Savio argues. "[As if] no events can occur now that the Second World War is over which can change American society substantially." With this tip of his theoretical hat to Daniel Bell's End of Ideology (and to the prominent critics of Bell, including Mills), Savio acknowledges the problems of a leftist politics in postwar America while simultaneously enacting an alternative solution: students themselves would become historical agents of structural change. "America is becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment," he charges:
The "futures" and "careers" for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown that they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable and irrelevant. (Savio)
Rather than simply mouthing the words of Mills's earlier call for a Left that would resist contemporary anomie, the FSM embodied his sentiment. The language of their demand for civil rights had, as Savio admitted ironically, "a deceptively quaint ring."
We are asking for the due process of law. We are asking for our actions to be judged by committees of our peers. We are asking that regulations ought to be considered as arrived at legitimately only from the consensus of the governed. These phrases are all pretty old, but they are not being taken seriously in America today, nor are they being taken seriously on the Berkeley campus. (Savio)
Savio's calls for self-governance, for the elimination of hierarchical leadership, and for a reduction of progress-limiting bureaucracy would sound prohibitively idealistic and naive were he not delivering them to a body of activists that represented, to some extent, a fruition of those very same ideals. "Essentially," Mattson writes of the FSM, "young people discovered not only existential politics and the power of democratic speech but also decentralized activism" (120).
Next up: Mailer on the Anti-War Movement and the End of the New Left
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