Northern intellectuals and the ordeal of race: the first decade of Dissent, 1954–64

Abstract

ABSTRACTFounded in 1953–4, Dissent assigned itself the task of reviving the political criticism that socialism had been articulating for roughly the previous century and a half. Though the magazine largely abandoned Marxism by the end of the decade, Dissent would remain the most durable journal of democratic socialism in the English-speaking world. The first decade of its history coincided with the intensified momentum of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and the quarterly certainly expressed its sympathy and support for the struggle for racial justice. But, in retrospect, the infrequency of that endorsement in the articles that were published in Dissent is noteworthy. Perhaps the two most famous articles ever to appear in the magazine nevertheless addressed the issue of race, and yet they did so with an eccentricity that made ‘The White Negro’ and ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ uncharacteristic of the stance of co-founders and co-editors Irving Howe and Lewis Coser. In 1957 Norman Mailer ignored the Civil Rights Movement itself to locate the emergence of a new kind of underground man, a hipster, who drew from the extreme and even violent alienation of the black sensibility to valorize the sensual and emotional at the expense of the rational and the civic. In 1959 Hannah Arendt repudiated the effort of civil rights organizations like the NAACP to desegregate public schools in the South, arguing that the psyches of black children were damaged by seeking to join hostile white children. Public schools, she argued, ought to be regarded as social institutions that permit discrimination. Instead the champions of racial equality ought to concentrate their efforts at eliminating the prohibitions against intermarriage. By the mid-1960s Dissent added its voice to the mainstream of the movement against Jim Crow, even as Howe celebrated black writers who managed to reconcile literary art with the imperatives of political protest.