It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.
—Charles Péguy, Notre Patrie, 1905

It is a pity that no one has yet written a history of the progressive mind in America. We are just distant enough from the heyday of progressivism to have a certain perspective on its characteristic ways of looking at the world, yet we are still just close enough to its demise—or its transmutation into something else—to have some vivid first-hand memories of the peculiar intellectual deformations it visited upon our political and cultural life for something like a third of the present century. Entire areas of American life—the media and publishing worlds, the entertainment industry, the Federal bureaucracy, education, the academy, even the churches—cannot be wholly understood without a firm grasp of what the progressive outlook bequeathed to us in the years of its ascendancy, which by my calculations extend from the end of the 1920s to the mid-1960s.

Such histories of the American political Left in this period as we have been given do not really satisfy the need for a study of the progressive mind, which, though anchored in left-wing political ideology, was always a reflection of something more than a set of political positions. The progressivism I speak of was an ethos, a cast of mind, a secular faith that reached into every aspect of living and thinking. It was thus as much a code of feeling as it was a mode of thought. Its loyalties determined everything from literary taste and the choice of spouses to the way children were educated and political events responded to. At the height of its influence, progressivism had an answer—or at least a response—for every question, which is why it could not be dislodged from its position of authority in the lives of its acolytes by specific political events, no matter how shattering, but required for its demise the emergence of an ethos even more radical and comprehensive and compelling in its prescriptions for life than the system of belief it supplanted. It is in this respect that the counterculture of the late Sixties and early Seventies, with its call for a more fundamental personal emancipation, may be said to have devoured the remnants of a once-regnant progressivism and propelled its progeny into a radicalism of a very different sort.

In speaking of the progressive mind in America we must distinguish, of course, between the ideas and attitudes propagated earlier in the century by the reform movements associated with Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and William Jennings Bryan, and the very different kind of progressivism that came to be identified, to one degree or another, with an allegiance to Stalinist fellow-traveling. Used in this latter sense, the word “progressive,” once so common in political parlance, isn’t much heard anymore in discussions of the radical Left in this country. It seems to have become a casualty of the Cold War. Conservatives, at least those old enough to have become familiar with the term in their youth, shun the very notion of progressivism as a euphemism for Stalinism itself—which, indeed, it very much still was when I was in school in the late Forties and early Fifties. Many liberals, especially those old enough to have experienced the duplicities of the Communists at first hand, avoid the word for the same reason. Yet even among people on the hard Left, progressive is a term that has lost its luster. It seems dated and a little tarnished—a throwback, perhaps, to an era more receptive to Marxist-inspired political causes than our own. Progressive is, in any event, too old-fashioned a term to serve the up-to-date purposes of the radical Left today, which are more likely to exploit the issues of race, sex, the environment, social welfare, and multiculturalism than to advocate Marxist-Leninist notions of revolution. Revolution of some sort had always, of course, been the subtext of Soviet-oriented American progressivism, but it was a subtext that dared not speak its name too loudly in public lest more moderate liberals, upon whom progressives were dependent for allies and access, be reminded of what progressive politics was really about.

All the same, no other word will do to describe the kind of Left-liberal mentality that once played so large a role in shaping American cultural life and the social thought on which it was based. In its heyday, progressivism always occupied a much larger place in American cultural life than Communism itself. For progressives, thanks to their liberal allies and patrons, often had easy entrée to milieux where known Communists were not entirely welcome. While all Communists were, in their public utterances at least, progressives, not all progressives were Communists—which is to say, under Communist Party discipline. Progressivism may thus be said to have represented the laity of the Communist movement in the Stalinist era, and as with any given faith, the style of obeisance to fundamental articles of belief naturally varied a good deal within its ranks.

Hollywood progressives, for example, differed markedly from their counterparts in the industrial labor movement. Comfortably situated progressives on The New Yorker, conforming to the ethos of their own subculture, tended to be more insouciant in their radicalism than, say, writers for The Nation. So, too, their respective progressive readers. And so it went. Harvard progressives were often more snobbish than those at City College, while Berkeley produced a community of progressives that differed from both.

Yet despite these differences in style, class, and disposition, what made these progressives an identifiable force in American cultural life were precisely the articles of belief they held in common, and foremost among them was a vision of American life—a vision of life itself—that was largely Stalinist in origin. Never mind what was actually taking place in the real-life Soviet Union in Stalin’s time. About that, for the most part, progressives of every stripe were marvelously adept at keeping themselves in a highly adaptable condition of disbelief. What was of compelling concern to them was life in the United States, which progressives viewed almost entirely in terms that were codified by the Communist Party line as it evolved in the course of its many modifications, permutations, and outright reversals to meet the needs of Soviet power. About a whole range of historic events and public figures—from the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the Spanish Civil War to the Alger Hiss conviction and the Hollywood Ten--progressives adopted an iconography and a demonology that have remained impervious to critical doubt or documentary evidence down to the present day. Which is why there has been no discernible impact on what remains of the progressive mind by the revelations lately emanating from the KGB archives in Russia. The verifiable facts of history had long ago ceased to be relevant to the progressives’ act of faith.

I have been reminded of all this once again by the new book that Nora Sayre has written about herself, her parents, their friends, her friends, their respective political allegiances, and her own unrepentant attachment to the old progressive sentimentalities.[1] Entitled, somewhat misleadingly, Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the 1950s, the book aspires to illuminate a much larger chunk of history than the despised decade in which Sayre herself came of age and upon which she now looks back with so much distaste. For this is a book that eulogizes the Twenties, gives us a kind of Popular Front cartoon version of the Thirties, castigates the Fifties, sentimentalizes the Sixties, and brings us up-to-date on what was left of the progressive platitudes well into the Eighties and Nineties.

About the Twenties, Sayre writes in a spirit of unembarrassed filial piety. The Twenties was the glamorous decade that shaped her parents’ lives and thus, in Sayre’s view, set a standard for how life should be lived that has never again been met. Her father, Joel Sayre, had worked on the old New York Herald-Tribune, made a middling reputation on The New Yorker, and, as Nora Sayre writes, “spent about five years in Hollywood, employed on over a dozen film projects.” Later he wrote for television. Her mother, Gertrude Lynahan, was also a journalist. Her career, it is said, “was abetted by H. L. Mencken.” In the Twenties she worked on The New York World at a time when Joseph Mitchell, later a colleague of her husband’s at The New Yorker, was a copy boy there. John O’Hara was Nora Sayre’s godfather. Other members of her parents’ circle included Nunnally Johnson, James Thurber, James M. Cain, St. Claire McKelway, S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, and Edmund Wilson, the latter a neighbor of the Sayres on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when Nora was growing up—one of the children, as she writes, “who passed the crackers and cheese and refilled the ice trays” at their parents’ cocktail parties and “felt colorless in comparison to our seniors.”

When I remember my parents’ friends [she writes], I think of them indoors, in living rooms, laughing, eating salted nuts and drinking whiskey, talking expansively—with a group rather than to one person. The setting would shift from New York to Beverly Hills and Cape Cod, occasionally to Connecticut. And one or two guests might spend the night, perhaps on sofas: next morning there would be the long silent trip to the bathroom, the speechless breakfast, and then a few jokes about hangovers. But no perceptible remorse.

In a show of progressive conscience, Sayre expresses some concern that “it may seem that I’ve confined myself to an elite” in the writing of Previous Convictions, but she hastens to add that “most of the writers of the Twenties and the radicals of the Thirties”—in other words, the figures under discussion in this book—“had made their own way—through their work.” In their work, whether for the commercial press in New York or for the Hollywood studios, Sayre believes that these models of progressive virtue scorned commercialism, but her own account of their careers doesn’t support such a claim. In her father’s case, for example, she makes it perfectly clear that he sought work in Hollywood in order to meet his family’s needs. His wife had suffered an irreversible breakdown and needed care. In addition, he wanted his daughter to attend Radcliffe College. Both required more money than Joel Sayre could make at The New Yorker. I think he behaved admirably in attending to the needs of his nearest and dearest, but why claim that this deliberate embrace of commercialism was the exact opposite of what Joel Sayre required of himself? Well, because commercialism represents a fall from honor in the progressive lexicon, and so must be denied even where the motive for it is easily explained.

It is in telltale details of this sort—and they become more flagrant and more abundant when Nora Sayre turns to “the radicals of the Thirties”—that we come to understand the peculiar variety of progressivism that pervades Previous Convictions, which its author characterizes as both “a memoir of mentalities” and “a book of ruminations.” For hers is a progressivism of nostalgia— a progressivism compounded almost exclusively of other people’s fond memories and cherished illusions and her own uncontainable envy for a time and a milieu in which an unclouded Left-liberal outlook on politics and a debonair style in art and life were joined in joyous opposition to what was otherwise seen to be a benighted society of ignoramuses and reactionaries. In other words, Menckenism adapted to the needs of middlebrow journalism and radical chic.

The envy which Sayre still harbors for this happy breed of debonair révoltés gives to everything she writes a distinct air of belatedness, a feeling that she and her generation arrived on the scene after the partying was over and only the debris—the hangovers, the recriminations, the denials of wrongdoing, the breakdowns—remained as souvenirs of better times. Feeling dispossessed of those better times, which Sayre identifies exclusively with her parents and their circle, she certainly understands that she was born too late to participate in their experience, yet she seems nonetheless to have adopted their characteristic attitudes— attitudes that became fixed in the Twenties and Thirties—as her own. These, not surprisingly, she soon found to be woefully inapplicable to life in the Fifties, and as a consequence she bitterly condemns the Fifties as “a bad time to be very young, a bad time to enter the early chapters of your life, bad for curiosity or the impulse to explore.”

It seems never to have occurred to her— even now, some forty-odd years later—that others, especially those born neither to her advantages nor to her disappointments, might look back on the Fifties with very different feelings, might indeed have reason to look back on the Fifties as better times than any we have seen since. But then, for some of us who were young in the Fifties, the parochial world into which Sayre was born—The New Yorker of Harold Ross and the Hollywood of the big studios—did not, after all, represent the summit of human achievement. For that matter, it did not represent the summit of journalistic or cinematic achievement. We read The New Yorker for the cartoons, for the criticism of Edmund Wilson and Louise Bogan, and for occasional outside contributors like Rebecca West, W. H. Auden, and V. S. Pritchett. Hollywood movies we went to for entertainment, just as we did when we were kids, not for art or edification, and we went to them a good deal less often once foreign films—movies for grownups, as I came to think of them—were readily available to us. In the arts, the critics whose writings meant the most to us—Clement Greenberg, B. H. Haggin, Virgil Thomson, Edwin Denby, Eric Bentley, Harold Clurman, Manny Farber—never appeared in The New Yorker, and most of those who did were better known for their wisecracks than for their critical sagacity. If we made allowances for a writer such as Dwight Macdonald, which in those days we did, it was largely because he had made his reputation in Partisan Review, and even in the Fifties his most audacious writing continued to be published by Partisan or Commentary, not The New Yorker.

For a sentimental progressive like Nora Sayre, however, the intellectual milieu represented by Partisan Review, Commentary, Encounter, and a handful of literary quarterlies remains enemy territory even in retrospect. For one thing, it was too highbrow in its tastes; its views of popular culture were far more critical than that of the middlebrow contributors to The New Yorker. For another, it espoused the wrong kind of politics; it was anti-Communist. Above all, it was merciless in exposing the fallacies of the progressive mind, not only in its political sentiments but for its literary and cultural pieties as well. In the Fifties, writes Sayre in Previous Convictions, “her family’s friends … thought the Cold War anti-Communists were extremely stupid,” and over the course of the last forty years this anti-anti-Communist stance—in many respects, the last refuge of progressive orthodoxy—has evolved in Sayre’s mind into a moral absolute. It made her earlier books —Sixties Going On Seventies (1973), a collection of journalistic pieces on the anti-Vietnam War movement and the counterculture, and Running Time: Films of the Cold War (1982), an attempt to anti-anti-Communist Hollywood history—little more than progressive caricatures of their respective genres. Except in one respect—Sayre’s touching account of her father’s life—the same moral imperative makes Previous Convictions a repository of all the most discredited progressive myths that have accumulated about the Thirties and the Fifties. In Nora Sayre’s progressive “journey” through the Fifties, Partisan Review is seen to have sold out to American conformity because of its anti-Communist position in the Cold War, Alger Hiss is thought to be guilty of nothing more than acting like a New Deal liberal, and the real political saints and martyrs of the decade are veteran Stalinist types like Donald Ogden Stewart and his wife, Ella Winter, the widow of Lincoln Steffens, living in comfortable political exile in London, and the Hollywood Ten, some of whom were still under Communist Party discipline. It is in such particulars that the progressivism of nostalgia degenerates into sheer fantasy and denial.

At times, to be sure, it is difficult to know whether Sayre is as flat-out ignorant of some of the figures she admires or is merely—how should one put it?--disingenuous. Malcolm Cowley, for example, is a figure Sayre much admires, and there is indeed something to admire in Cowley’s purely literary endeavors. Yet in Previous Convictions, Sayre praises Cowley for, of all things, his politics, which in the Thirties were largely party-line Stalinism. She cites two long letters written to Cowley by James Thurber in the Thirties in which the latter, as Sayre writes, “accused the Communists of trying ‘to put the artist in a uniform so like the uniform of the subway conductor that nobody would be able to tell the difference,’ and of a ‘desire to regiment and discipline art.’ ” Presciently, Thurber even expressed a fear that “the Communists [were] contributing to ‘the growing menace of fascism.’ ”

Yet it never occurs to Sayre to wonder why Thurber would have been writing such things to Cowley at that particular moment in history if, indeed, Cowley was as independent in his politics as she foolishly claims him to have been. No doubt it would have been a violation of progressive piety for Sayre to have reminded her readers that even Edmund Wilson—not your garden-variety Red-baiting reactionary, as even Sayre would concede—was moved to write as follows to Cowley, then still reigning as the literary editor of a very progressive New Republic, in October 1938:

What in God’s name has happened to you? I was told some time ago that you were circulating a letter asking endorsements of the last batch of Moscow trials—though you had just published articles in which, as far as I could tell, you were trying to express a certain amount of skepticism. I don’t suppose you’re a member of the C.P.; and I can’t imagine any other inducement short of bribery or blackmail—which sometimes appear in rather inobvious forms and to which I hope you haven’t fallen a victim—to justify and imitate their practices at this time. You’re a great guy to talk about the value of a non-partisan literary review after the way you’ve been plugging the damned old Stalinist line … at the expense of the interests of literature and to the detriment of critical standards in general!

That’s why Thurber was protesting to Malcolm Cowley, who was more brutally described by James T. Farrell as the “literary mouthpiece” of the Communist Party in the Thirties; but this is not the kind of historical intelligence that Nora Sayre regards as relevant to her progressive-valentine account of Cowley in the Thirties. Nor does Sayre bother to point out that it wasn’t until fifty years later—in the 1980s!—that Cowley deigned to acknowledge that he might have made some mistakes about “Russia” in the Thirties, and even at that late date used the occasion to revive his old quarrel with the anti-Stalinists at Partisan Review. For his politics and his illusions, Cowley is clearly one of Sayre’s role models.

Another seems to be Lillian Hellman, for there is much in Previous Convictions that reads like a distended remake of Scoundrel Time, with Donald Ogden Stewart and Ella Winter performing the roles originated by Dashiell Hammett and Hellman herself— the roles of romantic victims of political persecution rather than (what in fact they were) privileged and prevaricating apologists for a terrible political tyranny. As in Scoundrel Time, the writers and intellectuals associated with Partisan Review and Commentary are looked upon in Previous Convictions as greater enemies of American democracy than the followers of the Communist Party, for the former are seen to have failed the tests of progressive orthodoxy. This fantasy history repeats itself in the form of farce, but there is more than enough in Previous Convictions to remind us of what a malevolent farce the progressive mind itself has turned out to be.

Notes
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1. See, for example, The Reader’s Companion to American History, edited by Eric Foner and John A. Garraty and sponsored by the Society of American Historians, published in 1991. The entry for “Progressivism,” written by Robert M. Crunden, makes no reference to the Soviet-oriented progressivism I speak of here. In this connection, it should also be noted that while the book contains an entry for “Anticommunism,” written by Ellen W. Schrecker, there is none for “Communism,” though there is a brief, unsigned entry for the “Communist Party.” Go back to the text.
2. Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the 1950s, by Nora Sayre; Rutgers University Press, 462 pages, $37.95. Go back to the text.