YOUNG RADICALS: IN THE WAR FOR AMERICAN
IDEALS (2017)
Jeremy McCarter
Random House, 340 pages.
★★★★★
(This review originally posted on http:NEPCA.blogpost.com)
I didn’t like this book; I adored it! It is so well written that it
reads like novel. Among the unorthodox things Jeremy McCarter has done is pen
it in the present tense. Another is to make its major theme the death of
idealism. Or perhaps I should say its betrayal.
McCarter, a Chicago-based
writer and critic, turns his gaze to the first two centuries of the 20th
century, a time in which American socialism sprouted, blossomed, and was pulled
up by the roots—its dreams of a global cooperative community sacrificed upon
World War One’s altar of militarism, nationalism, greed. Rather than tell this
tale through the usual channels of analyzing historical forces, material
conditions, and mounting tensions, McCarter shows how larger dramas played out
in the lives of five fascinating characters: Max Eastman (1883-1969), John Reed
(1887-1920), Alice Paul (1885-1977), Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), and Randolph
Bourne (1886-1918). He chose well, as between them, they moved in circles that
represented the numerous strains within American culture.
The book’s title is apt, for
the five radicals were indeed young and were, in their own ways, warriors
within the “war for American ideals.” If you associate socialism with glum
Russian apparatchiks, think again. Max Eastman was the editor of The Masses, a publication that was as
much bohemian as socialist. Its pages supported labor unions, social equality, and
pacifism, but also sported graphic art, poetry, and fiction that ranged from
agit-prop to whimsical. It survived on a hope, serendipitous donations, and
Eastman's dogged determination to keep it afloat.
Journalist “Jack” Reed was an
energetic swashbuckler crossed with a frat boy. He seduced and exasperated, pontificated at one moment and
betrayed his half-baked views the next, pissed off his friends as he exhaled and
charmed them on the inhale. He was the very scarred embodiment of a fast, hard,
full, short life. He needed to be
where the action was, which is why he didn’t allow a lost kidney to keep him
out of Europe as war clouds gathered and why he was a firsthand witness to the Russian
Revolution.
Alice Paul wasn't good at moderation
either. Like a reckless campus radical, she put her body on the line for the
cause of suffrage and wore out others in the process, including Inez Milholland
Boissevain who died from taking part in Paul-orchestrated non-stop agitation.
Paul’s was a world of picketing, workhouse internments, force-feedings, and
embarrassing President Wilson. One of the book’s many revelations is the depth
of mutual contempt between Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt saw Paul as an
impetuous troublemaker who threatened her careful one-state-at-a-time strategy
and nearly cost Wilson the White House; Paul saw Catt as a self-aggrandizer willing
to tolerate the status quo to be an insider player in the Wilson
administration.
The latter charge was also
leveled at Lippmann, with some justification. Lippmann, who co-founded the New Republic, was an intellectual who
had trouble reconciling idealism and pragmatism. As war loomed, he jettisoned socialism
for liberalism and joined Wilson’s team in the vain hope the war would "make
the world safe for democracy.” Lippmann actually wrote most of Wilson’s famed
14-Points, but their abandonment led him to leak an internal document that
doomed Wilson's nationwide campaign for the League of Nations.
A good tale requires a
tragic figure and few were more so than Randolph Bourne. His was one of the
most inventive minds of his day. Bourne dreamt of transnational identities, cosmopolitanism,
and universal citizenship decades before Greenwich Villagers imagined themselves
global villagers. His capacious mind was housed in a sickly hunchbacked body
that he felt was doomed to be unloved. He was wrong; the beautiful free
spirited actress Esther Cornell seems to have accepted his marriage proposal,
only for Bourne to perish in the postwar influenza epidemic.
The postwar fallout took
more than Bourne with it. Socialism’s promise also faded—not just because of wartime
repression and the postwar Red Scare—but because idealists often battled with each
other, and bitterly so over the war. It has been said that World War One was
the only war wished into being by the left. Though somewhat hyperbolic, roughly
half of U.S. socialists—including Lippmann and John Dewey—supported the conflict.
Pro-war socialists were mistaken. History would soon judge the Great War a
disaster in nearly every way one can measure such things. Ideals such as
transnationalism gave way to cynicism and insularity. Paul would hold fast to
her principles, but Eastman and Lippman would embark on several journeys
between left, center, and right before settling into contrarianism.
McCarter’s book is a
masterpiece of forgotten and overlooked detail. It is also an examination of how
dream worlds and officialdom overlapped and separated. The book is so compellingly
written that I shall refrain from quoting so you can make your own discoveries and
savor the richness of its prose. Kudos to McCarver for restoring the “story” in
history and making tales come alive in real time. One can dispute whether the hopes
of McCarter's five young radicals were admirable or misguided, but there is
something tragic in the observation that we now live in a world too parochial
to conceive of globalism in non-economic terms. #jxmccarter
Rob Weir
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