Anti-Communist Epics

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on two writers who lent their literary prestige to National Review in the magazine’s early years: Whittaker Chambers and John Dos Passos. Chambers and Dos Passos were refugees from the 1930s left who joined the conservative movement in the 1950s. They adapted a Depression-era, Marxist analysis of the American middle class for right-wing purposes, influencing conservatives’ notion of the liberal establishment. This chapter explores Chambers’s Witness (1952), his memoir of his years as a Communist spy, and Dos Passos’s Midcentury (1961), a late-career novel in which he revisits the aesthetics of his U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936). Both books chronicle the rise of the American welfare state, tracing the class fault lines that gave rise to it; both imagine a post–World War II alliance between the working-class and property-owning entrepreneurs, at odds with the professional managerial class that ostensibly dominates that state. At the same time, both writers express unease about the role of literary intellectuals within the conservative movement, prefiguring the tensions that would characterize later writers’ association with National Review.