Further notes on yesterday’s post.
1. I would not apply the three-axes model to the 1950s. Here is the history as I see it:
From 1917 through 1989, I would say that there was one major axis of intellectual disagreement: pro-Communist or anti-Communist.
If you will forgive the oxymoron, in the culture of the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet Union was Silicon Valley–the epicenter of progress, or so it was thought. In the West, the Communist Party was where you went to find people with dynamism, energy, and confidence that they were “in league with the future.”
Meanwhile, anti-Communism had its ups (“red scare”) and downs (“Uncle Joe”)*, until soon after World War II, when it surged again, probably because of renewed pride in American culture and institutions combined with shock at the Soviet atomic bomb and the “fall of China.” Then Stalin’s death in 1951 and the subsequent revelation of the horrors of his regime ended the left’s romance with Communism. Although Western pro-Communism appeared to die with Stalin, the McCarthy-ite bullying of the 1950s produced a backlash of anti-anti-Communism. Finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall made the issue moot, or ended history, as Francis Fukuyama famously put it.
*Note that in the 1940s it was not obvious that Stalin was a monster. From 1941-1945, he was our ally.
2. One reader commented that my father, who drew my mother away from Communism, should have been considered a hero. That is not how bullies think. They regarded him as suspect for being associated with her (and probably to a large extent for being Jewish). A friend reminds me that my father submitted his resignation to the political science department of Washington University, because his position seemed so untenable. It was by not accepting his resignation that the University stood by him.
3. As an aside, I don’t think my mother could have persisted as a Communist in any case. I suspect that she fell in with Communists because, coming to Missouri determined to escape her Pennsylvania small-town existence, she perceived worldliness and sophistication in her Communist associates. It was through them that she met my aunt, who in turn introduced her to my father.
My aunt was very intelligent. All through high school she outshone my father academically. She even had her exploits covered in a long feature story in St. Louis’ leading newspaper. But her temperament was austere and humorless, viewing the world in black-and-white terms. Communism fit her very well.
My father’s intellectual temperament was the opposite. He was comfortable with ambiguity and profoundly skeptical of absolutist thinking. One of his favorite sayings was “The first iron law of social science is ‘sometimes it’s this way and sometimes it’s that way.'” He was not suited to Communism at all.
Neither was my mother, because she cherished amusement. In my boyhood, she sought to amuse me, and she found me amusing.
For example, a couple of times a year she and my father would go to the race track over in Illinois and place small bets. A few times they took me. In the early 1960s, they were lent a small analog computer in which one could use dials to enter information from the Racing Form and get a recommendation for betting. I was the one who worked that computer (at home, not at the track), and it took about half an hour to enter a few pieces of information about each horse in a single race. We never used it to try to bet. But it was an amusing experience.
4. Another reader asked what became of Dr. Sol Londe professionally. It’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer. Apparently, he kept his medical license. But I doubt that he could have held any position with, say, the Missouri Medical Association. [UPDATE: It turns out that he had a long and distinguished career in medicine and political activism. See the comments on this post.]
5. A progressive friend of mine claims that bullying is a Trump-era phenomenon. I would refer him to the Larry Summers case. It was in 2005 when Summers made his infamous remarks that male dominance in math departments was not necessarily due to oppression of women, but instead might reflect the fact that in the very upper extreme of math ability, men are more prevalent. His enemies distorted this into a supposed claim that “women can’t do math.” A vote of the Harvard faculty, many of whom disliked Summers for other reasons (he is easy to dislike) went against him. His resignation, unlike my father’s, was accepted, effective in 2006.
The way it appears to me now, the bullying of Summers/Harvard became the template for today’s social justice movement. It is easy not to feel sorry for Summers personally (he is easy to dislike). But the success of the campaign against him was a tragic episode from the standpoint of the principle of free inquiry.
By the way, even though Summers is easy to dislike, I mostly like him.
Summers ultimately gets clues.
For many other economists, not named, they have priors and will give up on new clues all together. The ‘This time is different’ syndrome. Summers does not suffer that condition.
Arnold, thank you for passing along this fascinating personal story.
As with all such stories, context is key. Few people today appreciate how common dalliances with communism and socialism were in the first 40 years of the 20th century. The disastrous consequences of WWI, the growing influence of unions, U.S. isolationism, opposition to British empire-building, the meltdown of capitalist economies in the early 1930’s, the socialist revolution that was a part of the Spanish Civil War beginning in 1936, the lack of media reporting of the brutal Soviet purges — all these influences and more contributed to the attraction of the ideal of an anti-capitalist state.
Adam Hochschild’s “To End All Wars” about World War I and “Spain in Our Hearts” about the Spanish Civil War explain these influences brilliantly in the context of the times.
Dr. Londe lived to be a 100 and had a successful and influential career apparently unhindered in any way. He remained active in political causes. Per a Lancet Obituary:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)17500-4/fulltext
“His outspokenness earned him an investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous House Un-American Activities Committee.
He would remain in St Louis until he retired from full-time practice in 1970, when he moved to Los Angeles. There, he helped to found the local chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR). “If there was a peace march, he would always be there”, said Saxon, who would later serve as president of the chapter. Londe, who was divorced, met his second wife, Jeanne, at a Washington DC rally protesting nuclear weapons. In Los Angeles, the two would frequently “table” outside of supermarkets to encourage passers by to sign petitions or register to vote. “Many physicians would feel it was beneath them to do that kind of grassroots work”, Saxon said. From the age of 80 to 95, Londe also worked part time at a detention centre for juveniles.”
“We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.” – Max Stirner
Interesting. I should have Googled him. I wonder if there is some sort of typo in saying that he moved from St. Louis in 1970, as opposed to, say, 1976. Because he diagnosed my Crohn’s Disease in 1974.
If you will forgive the oxymoron, in the culture of the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet Union was Silicon Valley–the epicenter of progress
This is a great personal story but this comparison is very extreme to the least considering Silicon Valley has about 20% of libertarians running as well and mostly private business. (Uber doesn’t hit me at like this.)
Was Soviet Union considered the epicenter of progress in 1920s? The US was upicenter after the 1921 recession and for the most very strong until the Depression was hitting 10 – 15% unemployment in after 1930.
Of course, what is your theory why The Great Depression hit so hard? Capitalism has never been that bad (25% in the US).
This interview with SV journalist Greg Ferenstein in 2016 points out libertarian is not really a Silicon Valley view.
http://www.aei.org/publication/what-does-silicon-valley-seem-to-love-democrats-and-dimiss-the-gop-a-qa-with-journalist-greg-ferenstein/
Re: “From 1917 through 1989, I would say that there was one major axis of intellectual disagreement: pro-Communist or anti-Communist.”
From the mid-1920s to 1945, there were two major axes of intellectual disagreement:
a) capitalism versus collectivization (economy axis)
b) parliamentary democracy versus modern dictatorship (charismatic leader, mass mobilization, single-party rule).
The UK, France, and the USA combined capitalism + democracy.
Italy (mid-1920s) and Germany (mid-1930s) moved rapidly towards capitalism + modern dictatorship. Note: They moved also towards highly regulated, politicized, neo-mercantilist capitalism.
Communist USSR combined collectivization + modern dictatorship.
The fact that there were two major axes explains why coalition-formation was variable and crucial in those years. At the outset of WWII, the crucial alliance was fascist/nazi states (capitalism + dictatorship) and communist USSR (collectivization + dictatorship) against bourgeois nations (capitalism + democracy). After Hitler invaded the USSR, the crucial coalition shifted to bourgeois nations (capitalism + democracy) and communist USSR (collectivization + modern dictatorship) against fascist/nazi states (capitalism + dictatorship). The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The single axis, which you (Arnold) describe, held full stage after the defeat of fascism/nazism (capitalism + modern dictatorship). Churchill: “An iron curtain has descended across the continent” (March 5, 1946).
Italy (mid-1920s) and Germany (mid-1930s) moved … also towards highly regulated, politicized, neo-mercantilist capitalism.
Gee, that sounds an awful lot like collectivism. It is fascinating to read early Nazi (officially National Socialist German Workers Party) propaganda. Full of complaints about how awful and selfish individualism is, and how the good of the collective has to take precedence.
Roger:
The reason the Italy/Germany systems weren’t “collectivism” in this context – even though they were to some degree “commanded” economies – is because they were Open economies.
Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist doctrine specified that, in order to be fully imposed and successful, the USSR must be a Closed economy – thereby protecting the Communist revolution from being “soiled” or undermined from any outside influence.
A distinction with a difference, as it were.
I think of 1945 as a key inflection point as well. Between 1776 and 1945 was the giant sorting along three axis: 1. nation-states, 2. industrialization, and 3. liberal vs. authoritarian political organization.
1965 and the civil-rights/anti-war protest movements seemed to be when Kling’s three-axis model kicked in for the non-communist world.
Excellent descriptive/explanatory real summary of the period, John Alcorn.
Well done.
The way it appears to me now, the bullying of Summers/Harvard became the template for today’s social justice movement.
Interesting point.
It also seems to correspond with the complete ascendance of liberal orthodoxy in the academy. Harvard harbored some conservative trends, based on a grand mission of intellectual ecumenism. Thus, we got E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve, while (from what I gather) Yale and others were pretty much completely cucked for modern progressive-ism.
After Summers, not too many are sticking their heads above the tall grass (though Jason Richwine comes to mind, which helps make the point.)
I think Greg Mankiw is still at Harvard. Perhaps somewhat analogously, he’s also the only regular contributor to the New York Times still worth reading.
I agree with all of Kling’s themes but the historical timing and significance of various events seem completely at odds with my understanding of them. Larry Summers’ talk was published online at the time of the controversy for anyone who was interested. Steven Pinker defended Larry Summers which demonstrated that he was technically/scientifically on solid ground. The previous promotion of Sheryl Sandberg by Larry Summers demonstrated that he was not a closet misogynist.
For me, the Larry Summers Harvard controversy was a minor event in a long history of social justice bullying (well since the anti-war/civil-rights protests in the 60’s). Another example of left-wing activists/journalists eating their own. Maybe I was aware of the nature vs nurture debate too early and assumed that the bullying was more widely known. Perhaps I should re-examine Kling’s claim that this event was a turning point for social justice bullying in academia. I just find it hard to rank this event higher than Stephen Jay Gould’s and Richard Lewontin’s attack on E.O. Wilson.
E.O. Wilson didn’t resign. Summers did.
The title of E.O. Wilson’s textbook and the name of his proposed field of study, Sociobiology, became taboo. The field had to be called the generic “evolutionary psychology”. Wilson turned his attention to the humanities and social sciences in his book Consilience instead of focusing publicly on his specialty of eusociality. Free inquiry was attacked.
Larry Summers was hired by Harvard due to his celebrity and fund-raising skills. His resignation was equivalent in significance to the resignation of Brendan Eich at Mozilla. Sad and wrong-headed but little more than an irritant in the larger scheme of things for each individual.
E.O. Wilson’s treatment was Galileo-esque in its suppression of new ideas, at least given the tools of suppression available in each age. Again, this may be my own biases showing. Personally I rank science/biology much higher than modern economics.
I’m not sure the disciplines are that relevant. Summers was speaking as the president of the university, not merely as an economist, and his comments on gender and IQ variance were actually pretty well established, and more widely known at the time than the things Wilson would write about. And the fact that the majority of faculty actually voted against him in light of the incident was a rather surprising realization-to me at least – of just how questionable the intellect was of the modern intellectual elite. I’ve met scientists (not social scientists, actual scientists) who remember that day he gave the lecture in disgust and liked to bring it up a decade later on, both utterly misremembering what he actually said, and amazingly still carrying water for radical social constructivism regarding gender differences. Summers’s sympathizers aren’t the only ones who seem to view the event as significant.
Actually, he followed up Sociobiology (1975) with On Human Nature (1978), which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1979. Genes, Mind and Culture, a collaboration with Charles Lumsden, came out in 1981. And of course, eusociality was a big part of 1990’s The Ants, for which he won a second Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Consilience doesn’t come out until 1998, but it is obviously a continuation of the “unification of knowledge” project of which Sociobiology was an early part. The subtitle of Sociobiology was The New Synthesis.
Free inquiry was certainly attacked in the response to Sociobiology and it emerged wounded. But Wilson survived and even thrived (no doubt helped by the fact that he is basically a good liberal and environmentalist).
Evolutionary psychology has even thrived, though popular and fashionable social theory continues to ignore or denigrate it.
E. O. Wilson is widely unknown. And little talked about.
Much like Stalin’s starvation of Ukraine 1932-33 was not talked about, or even lied about by the NY Times.
The anti-truth vote of the Harvard faculty seems a pretty decisive tipping point, with an acceleration of PC feelings over truth, and far more public censorship plus support for censorship.
Strong point by Arnold on this.
“From 1917 through 1989, I would say that there was one major axis of intellectual disagreement: pro-Communist or anti-Communist.”
I’m not sure how to interpret this, because my first intuition was “that’s an insane statement”.
But if the context is “intellectuals”, then maybe? I wasn’t there, and it is a select group, and I’ve read things that back up some of that assertion.
It just seems that whatever was going on with “intellectuals” during that time, it was pretty detached from the broader society. Perhaps one of the big recent changes is that intellectual society and regular society affect each other more due to reasons I think we’ve all discussed.
My Grandfather was a “communist” in the Great Depression, but I very much get the “anything buy this” feeling about it rather than some deep intellectual commitment to Marxism or something. Like you mother giving it up for a boyfriend, it was easily tossed aside.
“the Communist Party was where you went to find people with dynamism, energy, and confidence”
Of a certain type. There were lots of people starting businesses and winning war and doing other things that had those traits at that time.
It is easy to forgot how much the Cold War was a part of everything back in the day. My kids watch 80s movies are don’t quite get that an defined enemy has nukes pointed us and promised to bury us in decades past. And it was existential because the world as we knew could end at any point. (Combined with the WW2 victory that is the Cold War was one reason Civil Rights passed as the Soviets had endless Whataboutism! with defined segregation.) I will note by the 1980s, it was obvious something was wrong about the Soviet Union. There were endless stories of waiting in line for an hour to buy toilet paper or the number cause of house fires was poorly builts TVs. (Although we would snicker that all the best TVs were made in Japan in the 1980s.)
And it was reasonable complaint by the Reagan administration that all their leaders seemed to on their death bed or dieing until Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.
And 80% of foreign policy was seen through the prism of the Cold War. (Such as we over-reacted to Vietnam in early 1960s after our experience of Cuba.)
Note that in the 1940s it was not obvious that Stalin was a monster.
Really? It was my impression that the famines, the purges, the terror and so on were pretty well known in the West more or less as they occurred, and only the scale of them was up for debate.
Also, this is only tangentially related, but a few months ago, I stumbled on a little video series on youtube (basically a filmed podcast) about the Hiss-Chambers affair that was really really good called “A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon.” I would recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the whole saga of American communists in the mid-twentieth century.
The scale was roughly known too. Problem was, few intellectuals wanted to know any of that. It was easy to dismiss as crackpottery, defectors’ rantings etc., just as e.g. reports of Pol Pot’s activities in Cambodia were dismissed by Noam Chomsky and his ilk. Some Trotskyists may have tried to disseminate this information, maybe, but my impression is that they were way out on the margins until the death of Stalin, the XX CPSU congress and Hungary. By “intellectuals” I mean here the people who are the intellectual ancestors of today’s conservative and progressive thinkers, as the prewar conservatives, who had no illusions about Stalin or communism, left few respectable intellectual descendants. See for instance the dramatis personae of Terminiello vs City of Chicago, which I believe was mentioned here some time ago.
On that, a quote from the 1939 movie, Ninotchka:
Re Stalin not being a “monster” because he was our ally in WWII – before his alliance with the US and UK, of course, he was Hitler’s ally under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which ended only when Hitler turned on the Soviets in 1941 (much to Stalin’s surprise).
No intelligent person in the late 1940s could have been under any illusion that the USSR was some sort of “liberal” social democracy. Certainly, Stalin’s supporters in the CPUSA were indifferent to liberal principles, except insofar as they could be cynically and hypocritically deployed in self-defense against those trying to limit their influence.
Amazingly, most of the contemporary Left went on lionizing the Communist-sympathizing or -affiliated middle-brow entertainment industry figures who were blacklisted or mildly punished for failing to give up names (see e.g. the hosts on TBS) even as they were shrieking that anyone to the right of David Brooks was a shill for Putin. (Yes, that’s an exaggeration – George Will and Bill Kristol were not so accused.)
Yes, this was thought in the upper strata of progressive American intellectuals – young Boston ministers, New Dealers, that sort of thing; Elizabeth Bentley describes the milieu – and, for rather different reasons, among Eastern European Jews recently arrived via Ellis Island and their children and grandchildren; I learned a lot of details about that peculiar milieu from Verbeeten’s 2017 book. As I mentioned above, the lines of intellectual ancestry of both today’s conservatives and progressives run almost exclusively through these groups, and whatever was thought by other groups is thoroughly forgotten, except by a few specialists and internet weirdos. This ubiquitous phenomenon of selective historical knowledge can distort one’s perception of the past until, as asdf says above, to a person who has been exposed to the gory details of the real story wie es eigentlich gewesen, statements informed by such perception feel insane.
Interesting piece, Dr. Kling, but could I ask for one correction: the year of Stalin’s death in the long paragraph in section 1?
’51 & ’53 are quite different years for Stalin to die, and under different Presidents, and after the almost forgotten Korean War against the commies.
More thinking about PC-fantasy over truth is how seldom the US socialists accept N. Korea as socialist.
Tim Taylor talks about satelite data to help estimate economies:
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/09/satellite-data-economics.html
Interesting you use “anti-anti-Communism” to describe the backlash to the anti-communist hearings. Mises described the anti-anticommunist as below in 1956. Mises definition seems to fit what we’ve seen in the intervening years.
–Mises, Ludwig von (1956). The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
Your view and somewhat kind view of communism reflects you background. I think most of America understood the advantages of private ownership of property (as both small farms and small businesses were common) and for all but those with closed eyes (like your mother) the horrors of communism were well known.
The author’s grandparents were (Jewish) Party members as well, and his parents quite strongly liberal-prog. His take here I think Arnold might like:
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare/
a taste:
“At the height of the lame, doomed “Red Scare,” the Brown Scare was ten times bigger. You may think it was difficult making a living as a communist screenwriter in 1954. It was a lot easier than being a fascist screenwriter. Or even an anticommunist screenwriter. (Same thing, right?) And as any pathetic last shreds of real opposition shrink and die off, the Scare only grows. That’s how winners play it. That’s just how the permanent revolution rolls.”
Regardless of what you think of his dismissal as President of Harvard, Lawrence Summer’s life was not exactly “ruined”. he went on to be the managing partner at a hedge fund, served as an economic advisor to the Obama administration, and his name was floated as a potential Chairman of the Federal Reserve. I don’t know if economic advisor to the President is much of a step down even.
Personal anecdote: My career was largely “ruined” due to the Bush administration moving the control over ITAR export control regulation of commercial space, from the Department of Commerce (which had a more friendly attitude toward foreign trade) to the State Department (which was much more hawkish). Because I was a foreign national at the time, this reclassification meant that employing me in the commercial satellite industry was suddenly an “export” of controlled “duel-use” technology under the International Traffic in Arms Reduction Act.
It took me another ~8 years to complete the immigration process via family sponsorship, during which I was unable to work in my field.
That experience was not due to a “blacklist” or due to the personal choices of employers not to hire me. It was due to federal law. But it was every bit as destructive, to me personally, as if I had been blacklisted, if not more – I was officially legally proscribed from working in certain fields.
Other people living in America go through similar experiences all the time. At present there are millions of undocumented immigrants who could, if they were allowed, qualify for legal status, but cannot apply because the law mandates that they leave the country and wait 2-10 years before applying, and many of them have young children and spouses they cannot abandon for that length of time. These people have no official legal right to work in ANY industry. There are millions of young adults who were brought here as children, who also have no official legal right to have ANY job.
So, consequently, I tend not to feel so much concern for the occasional person who gets fired for shooting his mouth off on a controversial topic. There are far worse injustices occurring daily on a much more massive scale than that. In time the mob will forget whatever James Damore said and he will find another job and his life will go on. Meanwhile, thousands of young adult “Dreamers” will “age out” of the DACA program and wind up being deported to a foreign country. The federal government’s “blacklist” is a lot more absolute and more permanent than the one maintained by the SJW police.