Cutting through the Fog: Harvey Swados, C. Wright Mills, and Mid-Twentieth Century America

Abstract

The sociologist C. Wright Mills is no stranger to students of treatments of both the mid-twentieth century American Left and U.S. intellectual history. Mills’s confidante, neighbor, and intellectual ally, the novelist and essayist Harvey Swados, remains an understudied figure in the history of the twentieth century intellectual and literary left. A deeper examination of the Mills-Swados relationship provides not only with a more complete portrait of Mills, but another unique and independent voice in mid-twentieth century intellectual radicalism more clearly emerges. A one-time Trotskyist and a former member of the Max Shachtman-led Workers Party, Swados not only wrote acclaimed literary fiction, but also addressed issues that were distinctly unfashionable among the intellectual left in the 1950s and 1960s: the less ideological and more business-unionist labor leadership; the realities, including the humiliations, of the lives of blue-collar workers in the “Fat Fifties”; and the problems of how to interact with a generation of restless young people were coming of age in an era of material comfort, but who also increasingly wanted a larger voice in American society. Examining the relationship also allows us to better able understand the increasing tension between the different tendencies among leftist intellectuals in the years when Cold War concerns dominated American society, and accommodation with Soviet communism or new forms of socialism was seen as unacceptable by a once-radical generation of intellectuals disillusioned by the atrocities of Stalinism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 219.

2 David Brown, “Free Radical,” Review of Radical Ambition, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Summer2009/contents.html#

3 Much of the work on the New York Intellectuals builds on Daniel Aaron’s seminal work, Writers on the Left (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961). See the following: Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Alan Wald, 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); Hugh Wilford: The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s & 1950s (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); Harvey Teres, Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words (New York: The Free Press, 2000). Related biographical works include: Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1986); Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe, A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York: New York University of Press, 2002); Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Specific books about the New York intellectuals who first congregated around The Partisan Review and Dwight Macdonald’s politics, and later contributed to all the post-war organs of the anti-Stalinist Left include: Gregory Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the politics Circle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Terry Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); James Burkhart Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968).

4 For Alan Wald’s treatment of Swados, see Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 334–43. Other than Wald, the best place for biographical treatments on Swados are the introductions to reissued volumes of his work, and two dissertations which deal in part or in whole with Swados. See Lichtenstein, introduction to Harvey Swados, On the Line; Robin Swados, introduction to Harvey Swados, Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn: The Collected Stories of Harvey Swados (New York: Viking, 1986); Neil Isaacs, introduction to Harvey Swados, The Unknown Constellations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). Also see Gregory Geddes, Literature and Labor: Harvey Swados and the Twentieth-Century American Left (PhD dissertation, State University of New York, Binghamton, 2006); Robert Bussel, Hard Traveling: Powers Hapgood, Harvey Swados, Bayard Rustin and the Fate of Independent Radicalism in Twentieth-Century America (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1993). Given their personal relationship and the closeness of their families, it is perhaps unsurprising that Swados is dealt with more in full in the Kathryn and Pamela Mills-edited, C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For treatments of Hofstadter that discuss Swados, see Michael Kazin, “Hofstadter Lives: Political Culture and Temperament in the Work of an American Historian,” Reviews in American History 27, no. 2 (1999): 334–48; David Greenberg, “Richard Hofstadter’s Tradition,” The Atlantic, November 1998, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98nov/hofstadt.htm; Eric Foner, introduction to Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992), ix–xxvii; Susan Stout Baker, Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).

5 See Nelson Lichtenstein, introduction to Harvey Swados, On the Line (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), xvii.

6 America and the Intellectuals: A Symposium (New York: Partisan Review Series, 1953), 4. And they were primarily men – only two of the twenty-five participants were women. In a tale that has been told a number of times, Partisan Review began as an organ of New York City’s John Reed Club and, thus was a baby of the Communist Party. Under the leadership of William Phillips and Philip Rahv, however, the PR attempted to become more pluralistic and “literary,” and a clash with CP literary commissars could not be avoided. After shutting up shop in late 1936, the PR reemerged in late 1937 with Trotskyist sympathies. See Gilbert, Writers and Partisans, 119–34.

7 Swados, Hofstadter and the historian William Miller all stayed close to Mills until he died. Relying on interviews with Hofstadter, Swados, and Miller, Richard Gillam noted that all three men at one time had “an honored place” as Mills’s best friend. See Richard Gillam, C. Wright Mills: 1916–1948: An Intellectual Biography (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1972), 170.

8 Dan Wakefield, in “Letters,” Dissent, Fall 1963, 296.

9 Baker, Radical Beginnings, 28–9.

10 Swados may have been expelled from the YCL. In October 1938, Swados grew more disillusioned with communism, and he apparently was not properly following the YCL line. He received a letter from one Philip Cummins, “Chmn. For the Exec. Comm” that read: “Dear Sir: Charges of disloyalty to the League, and opposition to its program, have been preferred against you to the executive Committee of the branch. The Executive Committee will accord you a hearing and consider the charges this Friday, October 7, at 7 pm. Will you please meet us on the northeast corner of Huron and State, at that time? We urge that you attend. Failure to appear, or to inform us of your inability to come at that time, will be interpreted as indifference on your part.” Philip Cummins to Harvey Swados, 5 October 1938, Box 32, Folder 27, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

11 For the best treatments of Shachtman and the WP, see Peter Drucker, Max Shachtman’s Left (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1994) & 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). Also see the minutes of a 1983 Tamiment Institute conference on the Workers Party: The Legacy of the Workers Party, 1940–1949: Recollections and Reflections, A Tamiment Library/Oral History of the American Left Conference, May 6–7, 1983. In author’s possession. In respect to his first marriage, Swados had met a graduate student, Billie Aronson, in Ann Arbor and quickly married. Little is known about his first marriage, although when Neil Isaacs spoke to old acquaintances and relatives of Swados in the early 1990s, they remembered that Billie was “lively, and vivaciously flirtatious.” It is unclear why they divorced, but as Isaacs’ notes, the marriage collapsed by the time Harvey relocated to New York City in 1941.

12 See Harvey Swados, “Those Southern Degenerates,” The New Leader, October 31, 1942; “The Unglamorous People,” The New Leader, November 14, 1942; “The Brazil Story,” The New Leader, March 20, 1943.

13 Harvey Swados, Preface, A Radical At Large (Rupert Hart-Davis: London, 1968), 9.

14 Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism, 54–6.

15 Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 1–9; also see Sorin, Irving Howe, 4–10.

16 See for perceptive and concise treatment, see Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 12–25. Bloom’s is a fine examination of the relationship that second-generation immigrants like Kazin, Bell, Howe, and Sidney Hook had with their families and surrounding communities.

17 See Alfred Kazin Starting Out in the Thirties (Atlantic Monthly – Little, Brown, 1965), 98–110 & 112–15, 132–3; Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Viking, 1978), 22–5; and Alfred Kazin, A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 12–14. Kazin’s most explicit demolition of Felice is in, arguably, Starting Out in the Thirties.

18 Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 8.

19 Richard Gillam, “C. Wright Mills and the Politics of Truth: The Power Elite Revisited,” The American Quarterly, October 1975, 465.

20 Gillam, C. Wright Mills, 1916–1948: An Intellectual Biography (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1973), 273–80. He was not of the same generational cohort as Swados and he had an enormous tendency towards self-promotion, but Norman Podhoretz captures the sort of personal and professional relationships that characterized the New York intellectual scene in Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), 109–76. See especially the description of, as Podhoretz described it, his “bar mitzvah ceremony” thrown by members of the “family” after his publication of a review of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, 166–8.

21 Harvey Swados, “C. Wright Mills: A Personal Memoir,” in A Radical at Large, 199. Originally published in Dissent, Winter 1963.

22 Harvey Swados, Letter to the editor, politics, April 1944. Swados writes: I feel compelled to protest against the inclusion of your first issue of that “Letter from Petersburg, Va.” It is just that kind of snide, snotty, sophomoric provincialism that is going to repel readers outside of N.Y.C…There are some fine people around who wouldn’t know George’s bar from Chumley’s and who are all the more to be admired because they have the guts to work and struggle in intellectually inhospitable (in some cases hostile) surroundings.

23 C. Wright Mills to Frances and Charles Grover Mills, 22 December 1944, as quoted in K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 82.

24 Scrawled at the top of the page in Mills’s handwriting is, “Seminar Aug. 24, 1946. In talking with Harvey of his marriage.” See C. Wright Mills Papers, Box 4B375, Center for American History (CAH), University of Texas, Austin.

25 Geary, Radical Ambition, 120–2. For Swados and Sanes’s collaboration, see See Irving Sanes and Harvey Swados, “Certain Jewish Writers: Noted on Their Stereotypes,” The Menorah Journal, Spring 1949.

26 C. Wright Mills, “Notes at Harveys,” nd, Box 4B363, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas.

27 Harvey Swados, Journal Entry, 11 March 1948, Box 28, Folder 343, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts. Mills also was impressed by Weinberg, who represented the sort of union official that both Swados and Mills believed to be too rare in 1948. See Geary, Radical Ambition, 123.

28 Harvey Swados, Journal Entry, 14 April 1948, Box 28, Folder 343, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts. Rodenko was eventually published in 1995 as The Unknown Constellations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

29 K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, xii.

30 Dan Wakefield to Mills’s parents (Charles Grover Mills and Frances Ursula Wright Mills), nd, Box 4B400, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin & Dan Wakefield, “Letters” Dissent, Fall, 1963, 296. Also see Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 35–6.

31 K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, xii.

32 Swados, “C. Wright Mills,” in A Radical at Large, 204.

33 Ibid., 203.

34 Mills certainly did not care for what he regarded as the insularity of their vision. As he noted in The Causes of World War III, “Nobody locks them up. Nobody has to. They are locking themselves up – the shrill and angry ones in the totality of their own parochial anger.” Mills, quoted in Mattson, Intellectuals in Action, 90.

35 Harvey Swados, “Be Happy, Go Liberal,” in A Radical’s America (Boston, MA: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1962), 265.

36 Leslie Fiedler, “McCarthy and the Intellectuals,” in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (New York: Stein and Day, 1971. Originally published in An End to Innocence (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955)), 67. This essay, in somewhat different form, originally appeared in Encounter under the title, “McCarthy,” in August 1954. Also see: Diana Trilling, “The Oppenheimer Case: A Reading of Testimony,” in Claremont Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), originally published in Partisan Review.

37 Swados, “Be Happy, Go Liberal,” in A Radical’s America, 270.

Ibid., 269. Swados ended his essay with the following call: “Let those of us therefore who are going to be grappling with these radical problems call ourselves radicals, and leave liberalism to those who claim possession, but warp its militant elements to fit a passive literary pattern of fashionable nuances serving only to conceal their own utter emptiness and prostration before the status quo.” Swados, “Be Happy, Go Liberal,” A Radical’s America, 273.

39 Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, 120–1.

40 Irving Howe, “Radical Questions,” Partisan Review, Spring 1966, 180–1.

41 Macdonald, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 197–201. Macdonald’s famous declaration came out of a 1952 debate with Norman Mailer at Mount Holyoke College. See also Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, 136–44 for a good description of the Partisan Review intellectuals’ tendency to “applaud” rather than “evaluate” and criticize post-war American society. For a solid brief synopsis of Irving Howe and Dissent’s guarded support of U.S. foreign policy, see Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 105–8.

Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945–1970 (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2002), 51.

43 C. Wright Mills to Harvey Swados, 23 September 1956, quoted in K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 213–14.

44 Harvey Swados to Candida Donadio, 1 July 1964, Box 37, Folder 91c, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

45 Harvey Swados, Journal Entry, 19 December 1945, Box 28, Folder 343, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

46 Sorin, Irving Howe, 52.

47 Dwight Macdonald to Harvey Swados, 8 July 1948, Dwight Macdonald Papers, Yale University Library.

48 Harvey Swados, “An Option on the Future,” politics, summer 1948, 191.

49 Swados intended False Coin to be a “novel of ideas” that was accessible to the middle-class reader. The utopian setting and story is no more highbrow than two novels similar to it – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, written a century earlier, and Mary McCarthy’s The Oasis, written a decade earlier.

50 C. Wright Mills to Harvey Swados, 12 March 1957, Box 33, Folder 51, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

51 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 1 April 1958, Box 4B400, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin.

52 C. Wright Mills to Harvey Swados, 8 December 1959, Box 4, Folder 16, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

53 See K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 215–16.

54 C. Wright Mills to Harvey Swados, 8 December 1959, Box 4, Folder 16, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts. Mills’s criticism had merit. New York Times’ reviewer William Peden believed that Swados had, “written a thoughtful and timely novel,” but noted that there was something forced about the manner in which Swados directed his characters into endless coincidences. “That [Swados] does not completely succeed,” Peden wrote, “is partly due to his unconvincing accumulation of contrivance at the climax.” See William Peden, “Dissonant Notes at Harmoney Farm,” New York Times, January 10, 1960.

55 C. Wright Mills to Walter Reuther, 28 March 1946, Box 4B368, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin. Also see Mattson, Intellectuals in Action, 52–6.

56 C. Wright Mills to Harvey Swados, 9 September 1958, Box 33, Folder 51, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

57 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 16 September 1957, Box 4B405, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin.

58 For example, also see “The UAW – Over the Top or Over the Hill?,” in A Radical at Large; “West Coast Waterfront,” in A Radical at Large. Originally published in Dissent, Autumn, 1961; “The Miners: Men Without Work,” in A Radical’s America. Originally published in Dissent, Autumn, 1959; “The Myth of the Powerful Worker,” in A Radical’s America. Originally published in The Nation, June 28–July 5, 1958.

59 C. Wright Mills to Harvey Swados, 9 September 1957, Box 33, Folder 51, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

60 Karl, American Fictions, 82.

61 Lichtenstein, introduction to Harvey Swados, On the Line, xvii.

62 Harvey Swados, “The Myth of the Happy Worker,” in A Radical’s America, 113–14 & 116. Originally published in The Nation, August 17, 1957.

63 Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 103. Marquart had been involved in labor wars since the 1920s, and was involved in the United Auto Worker’s Education Department. For Marquart’s contributions to Dissent, see Frank Marquart, Anxiety Comes to the Auto Capital,” Dissent, Summer 1954, & “The Auto Worker,” Dissent, Summer, 1957. Also see Frank Marquart, An Auto Workers Journal (Harrisburg: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975).

64 Harold Wilensky, Intellectuals in Labor Unions: Organizational Pressures On Professional Roles (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1956), 119–20.

65 Swados, “The Myth of the Happy Worker,” in A Radical’s America, 115–16.

66 See Daniel Bell, “Work And Its Discontents,” in The End of Ideology, 222–62.

67 Quoted in Leon Fink, “Intellectuals” versus “Workers”: Academic Requirements and the Creation of Labor History,” American Historical Review 96, no. 2 (April, 1991): 410.

68 Swados, “The Myth of the Happy Worker,” in A Radical’s America, 116–17.

69 Ibid., 117.

70 Harvey Swados, “Work as a Public Issue,” in A Radical’s America, 124. Originally published in The Saturday Review, December 12, 1959.

71 Swados, “Work as a Public Issue,” in A Radical’s America, 122.

72 C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York, 1951), 224–7, 236–7, & Ely Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955) 85–6.

73 Mills, White Collar, 227.

74 Ibid., 236.

75 Swados, “Work as a Public Issue,” in A Radical’s America, 122–3.

76 C. Wright Mills, “A Look At the White Collar,” in Power, Politics and People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 147.

77 See Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream, 3; 6; 19–22.

78 Quoted in Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream, 127.

79 Swados, “Work as a Public Issue,” in A Radical’s America, 127.

80 Swados, “Labor’s Cultural Degradation,” in A Radical’s America, 69. Originally published in The American Socialist, July–August, 1958. For another example of Swados’s thoughts on mass culture, see Harvey Swados, “Paper Books: What Do They Promise?” The Nation, August 11, 1951.

81 Swados, “Labor’s Cultural Degradation,” in A Radical’s America, 72.

82 C. Wright Mills to Harvey Swados, 10 October 1956, in K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 215.

83 C. Wright Mills to Harvey Swados, 10 October 1956, Box 33, Folder 51, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

84 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 16 September 1957, Box 4B405, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin.

85 Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957). For an excellent synopsis of Macdonald’s views, see Paul Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture In Twentieth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 170–81.

86 Dan Wakefield, introduction to K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 8. For another account of Mills’s struggles with writing, see William Form, “Memories of C. Wright Mills,” Work and Occupations 34, no. 2 (May 2007): 152.

87 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).

88 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 1 April 1958, Box 4B400, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin.

89 Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 192.

90 Ibid., 5.

91 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 1 April 1958, Box 4B400, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin.

92 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 1 April 1958, Box 4B400, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin. Regarding the organization of the book, Swados went on: “[W]hen you get inside almost any given chapter you are flung into a maze of I LL III 123 abc ABC La Il Iib which I must say in certain cases verges on the ludicrous.”

93 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 1 April 1958, Box 4B400, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin.

94 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 1 April 1958, Box 4B400, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin.

95 Dwight Macdonald, “Abstraction Ad Absurdum,” Partisan Review 19, no. 1 (January–February 1952).

96 Harvey Swados, quoted in K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 163. For Kathryn Mills’s discussion of the entire affair, see 162–5. Swados’s letter appeared in Partisan Review 19, no. 4 (July–August 1952). Michael Wreszin discussed the incident in Dwight Macdonald: A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 262–5. In a June 1990 interview with Wreszin, Daniel Bell claimed that he and Richard Hofstadter criticized Macdonald for being “unfair.” See Wreszin, Dwight Macdonald, 262. However, Kathryn Mills has noted that “Harvey Swados was the friend who publicly defended White Collar in a letter to the editor of the Partisan Review.” See K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 163.’ Macdonald and Mills broke over the review. Macdonald acknowledged later, “I can see why Wright took it ‘personally’.” See Macdonald, Discriminations, 299–300.

97 Swados, “C. Wright Mills,” in A Radical at Large, 206. Swados described Mills’s Soviet visit as “triumphal.” Some of these arguments, Swados wrote, became “shouting sessions.”

98 C. Wright Mills, “The Balance of Blame,” The Nation 190, no. 25 (June 18, 1960). This article is essentially an extension of Mills’s arguments in 1958’s The Causes of World War III (New York: Ballantine).

99 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 22 June 1960, Box 4B420, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid.

104 Richard Hofstadter to C. Wright Mills, 10 December 1958, Box 4B420, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin.

105 Harvey Swados to James Farrell, 28 December 1957, James Farrell Papers, University of Pennsylvania.

106 Harvey Swados to C. Wright Mills, 16 September 1957, Mills Papers, CAH, University of Texas, Austin. Swados went on to add: “Of course we are a long way from that – first there has to be even the admission that there are real problems to which answers must be found. However I am no politician or social scientist & so will confine myself to writing & talking about fiction – stories.”

107 Harvey Swados, “Why Resign From the Human Race?,” Box 24, Folder 291, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

108 Harvey Swados, “Why Resign From the Human Race?,” in A Radical’s America, 328. Originally published in Esquire, September 1959.

109 Swados, “Why Resign From the Human Race?,” in A Radical’s America, 329.

110 Ibid., 330.

111 Ibid., 330.

112 Ibid., 330.

113 Ibid., 330–1; 335.

114 Ibid., 333–5. Swados’s call was an international one. “This work force,” he wrote would be recruited from the recent college graduates of universities in the United States, Canada, England, Western Europe, the Scandinavian countries, the USSR, and the highly developed nations in the Russian orbit such as Czechoslovakia.” See Swados, 333.

115 Swados, “Why Resign From the Human Race?,” in A Radical’s America, 335–6.

116 Ibid., 336–7.

117 Ibid., 332–3.

118 Ibid., 338.

119 Bussel, Hard Traveling, 299.

120 Swados, “Why Resign From the Human Race?,” in A Radical’s America, 339–44.

121 Ibid., 344. In his autobiography Huber t Humphrey wrote that well before John Kennedy’s proposal, “It was in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries [in early 1960] that I outlined my proposal for the Peace Corps.” Hubert Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976), 229. Humphrey biographer Carl Solberg claimed that Humphrey had “first proposed the idea in 1957.” Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984), 216. Kennedy special counsel Ted Sorensen remembered it differently: “The Peace Corps proposal…was based on the Mormon and other voluntary religious service efforts, on an editorial Kennedy had read years earlier, on a speech by General Gavin, on a luncheon I had with a Philadelphia businessman, on the suggestions of his academic advisers, on legislation previously introduced and on the written response to a spontaneous late-night challenged he issued to Michigan students.” Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 184. It is unknown what “editorial” to which Sorensen referred.

122 Isaacs, introduction to Harvey Swados, The Unknown Constellations, xli. Other authors have noted that Swados’s essay may have inspired the Peace Corps. See Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 340 & Bussel, “Hard Traveling,” 229. Robin Swados, in his 1986 introduction to his father’s collected stories, wrote that “Why Resign From the Human Race?” was “generally acknowledged to have inspired the formation of the Peace Corps.” Robin Swados, introduction to Swados, Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn: The Collected Stories of Harvey Swados, xvi.

123 About the 1960 Democratic primary election, which he lost to John Kennedy, and the Peace Corps’ eventual enactment, Hubert Humphrey wrote, “Thus, if there must be sad losers in presidential primaries, as I was in 1960, there is the solace that some constructive purposes are served.” Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man, 229.

124 Swados, “Why Resign From the Human Race?,” in A Radical’s America, 344.

125 C. Wright Mills, “A Letter to the New Left,” in Power, Politics and People, 248. Originally published in New Left Review, No. 5, September–October 1960.

126 Mills, “A Letter to the New Left,” in Power, Politics and People, 249.

127 Ibid., 259. Mills had little to say in his work about gender, and his use of “old women” here says much about the attitude of the New York intellectual group about the gender issue. To his credit, Daniel Bell, perhaps the primary target of Mills’s invective, eschewed a more personal response in the style of Irving Howe, and composed a sober and thoughtful, though at times stinging, rejoinder. In the December 1960 issue of Encounter, Bell stated that the most prominent aspect of Mills’s “propositions, about the article as a whole (and, in fact, of so much of Mills’s writing) is that no point is ever argued or developed, it is only asserted and re-asserted. This may be fine as rhetorical strategy, but it is maddening for anyone who does not, to begin with, accept Mills’s self-election as an ideological leader.” Bell also made the crucial point that Mills had previously heard from Swados: the promised wonderland supposedly guaranteed by a particular social or political movement did not justify any and all means to ensure said program. See Bell, “Vulgar Sociology: On C. Wright Mills and the “Letter to the New Left,” in The Winding Road, 138–43. For quotation, see 140–1.

128 Geary, Radical Ambition, 124.

129 Mills, “A Letter to the New Left,” in Power, Politics, and People, 250. Mills later wrote that “They” – presumably the NATO/New York intellectuals, “tell us we “don’t really understand” Russia – and China – today. That is true; we don’t; neither do they; we are studying it.” The “we are studying it” reeks of the sort of apologia that Swados had longed warned Mills against. See Mills, “A Letter to the New Left,” in Power, Politics and People, 253–4.

130 Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich), 244–5.

131 See, for example, Harvey Swados to Richard Hofstadter, 8 September 1967, Richard Hofstadter Papers, Columbia University. For the conflict between the well-meaning Howe and the New Left, first examine Howe’s 1965, “New Styles in “Leftism”,” in Steady Work” Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, 1953–1966 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 68–9. Originally published in Dissent, Summer 1965. Howe delivered “New Styles in Leftism” as a speech around the country, and, according to his biographer, Gerald Sorin, “had a hard time controlling his temper or curbing his sarcasm when responding” to questions from his audiences. See Sorin, Irving Howe, 211. A bitter debate between Howe and Tom Hayden in New York City in May 1965 on “New Styles in Leftism” ended with Hayden leaving the hall in tears. Sorin, Irving Howe, 206.

132 Harvey Swados to Richard Hofstadter, 8 September 1967, Richard Hofstadter Papers, Columbia University.

133 C. Wright Mills, Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960).

134 Mills, Listen Yankee, 180.

135 Swados, Introduction, A Radical’s America, xiii.

136 Ibid., xiii.

137 K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 338; Harvey Swados, “C. Wright Mills,” in A Radical at Large, 199.

138 K. Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 338.

139 Swados, “C. Wright Mills,” in A Radical’s America, 199 & 206.

140 The sociologists Ralph Miliband and Irving Horowitz both criticized Swados’s essay. Horowitz curiously described Swados’s memoir as “a savage critique,” some twenty years later. Horowitz had just published a biography of Mills, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York: Free Press, 1983). The Mills family sharply denounced Horowitz’s book, with Kathryn Mills detailing many factual errors. See The New York Times, “Mills Misrepresented?” April 15, 1984. Horowitz responded, claiming the family’s letter was “ludicrous,” and charging that Mills deserved “more than family outrage served up as intellectual pablum.” See The New York Times, “On C. Wright Mills,” May 20, 1984. Horowitz went on to claim that Mills’s admiration for Castro had never diminished, in sharp contrast to what Harvey Swados wrote in 1963: “In his last few months Mills was torn between defending Listen Yankee as a good and honest book, and acknowledging publicly for the first time in his life that he had been terribly wrong.” See Swados, C. Wright Mills, in A Radical at Large, 207. For Horowitz’s relationship to Mills, see John H. Summers, “The Epigone’s Embrace: Irving Louis Horowitz on C. Wright Mills,” The Minnesota Review, ns 68, Spring 2007, http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns68/summers.shtml. For Miliband’s objections, see “Letters,” Dissent, Fall 1963, 296–7. A close mutual friend of Swados and Mills, Dan Wakefield, admired the “remarkable” portrait drawn by Swados, and by treating Mills as a “man instead of a monument,” Swados had “given Mills a greater tribute than he would have by taking the easy course of undulated adulation.” See Wakefield, “Letters,” Dissent, Fall 1963, 296.

141 Swados, “C. Wright Mills,” in A Radical at Large, 200.

142 Ibid., 202.

143 Ibid., 205.

144 Ibid., 206.

145 Ibid., 205.

146 Ibid., 204.

147 Harvey Swados, quoted in K. Mills, C. Wright Mills, 341.

148 Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, 368. George Cotkin has written that the older group believed it was important that they “maintain their distinction as intellectuals by excluding those who did not seem to warrant inclusion, according to preconceived criteria of high versus low culture.” Cotkin, “Post-war American Intellectuals and Mass Culture,” in Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch, eds., Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie (London: Routledge, 1997), 260. For Neil Jumonville’s brief but perceptive analysis of the antagonism towards the Beats by the older generation, see 186–93. Also see Alexander Bloom’s fine analysis in Prodigal Sons, 301–4. Bloom also argued that the “changed culture” that the 1940s and 1950s produced was bound to have some influence on the coming generation of radicals: “Political ideas might reflect past years, but these ideas were rooted in a changed culture. From that new context, new cultural ideas developed to complement the political. A “new sensibility” matched the new ideology – and this too grated on the [older] New Yorkers.” See Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 356.

149 For example, see the following essays: Harvey Swados, “Topics: Workers and Students – Enemies or Allies?” The New York Times, August 30, 1969; “The New Left and the Old,” The New York Times, November 28, 1970; Harvey Swados, “The Joys and Terrors of Sending The Kids to College,” The New York Times, February 14, 1971; “The New Left and the Old,” The New York Times, November 28, 1970; the unpublished essay, “Karl Marx Lives,” Box 21, Folder 332, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

150 Steve Norwood, in The Legacy of the Workers Party, 1940–1949: Recollections and Reflections, conference program, 22.

151 Harvey Swados to Leo Litwack, 8 April 1969, Box 37, Folder 91d, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.

152 Swados, “The New Left and the Old,” The New York Times, November 26, 1970.

153 Swados, Introduction, A Radical’s America, xiii.

154 See Harvey Swados, “Old Con, Black Panther, Brilliant Writer and Quintessential American,” The New York Times, September 7, 1969; “The Bridge Over the River Jordan,” The New York Times, November 26, 1967; “The City’s Island of the Damned,” The New York Times, April 26, 1970.

155 Swados, Introduction, A Radical’s America, xiv.

156 For example, see Irving Howe to Harvey Swados, 28 June 1971, Box 32, Folder 39, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts & “Morning Session, May 7: Standing Fast and Harvey Swados,” The Legacy of the Workers Party, 1940–1949: Recollections and Reflections, conference program, 21–34.

157 Dan Wakefield to Harvey Swados, February 3, [1971], Box 34, Folder 67, Swados Papers, University of Massachusetts.