WHICH RADICALS?

• Author: Sunstein, Cass R.
• Position: Book review

YOUNG RADICALS: IN THE WAR FOR AMERICAN IDEALS. By Jeremy McCarter. New York: Random House. 2017. Pp. xvii, 324. $30.

INTRODUCTION

Should radicalism speak to us? Which kind?

There are many possible answers, and in the future, there will be many more. Right now, the United States contains passionate young thinkers who favor radical reform. They are in their twenties. Some of them sound crazy. They have bold ideas about liberty, equality, and democracy, and about what is wrong with our nation. You haven't heard their names, but you will. In a hundred years, people will write whole books about them.

Some of them believe that we have ignored a form of systematic injustice and that the Constitution should be amended to stamp it out. They are marching in the footsteps of Alice Paul, a tireless advocate of sex equality and a critical force behind the women's suffrage movement (p. xvi). Others insist that in the modern world, our conception of democratic self-rule is hopelessly naive and that we need to find a way to empower experts--scientists and statisticians--who see the world as it is. They are following the lead of Walter Lippmann, social theorist and journalist (pp. xvi, 3), who was an early diagnostician of fake news and echo chambers. Some of them have no interest in democracy or expertise; they want to promote liberty, as they understand it, or they are inspired by religious convictions, and they reject the idea of separation of church and state. Some of them embrace liberalism in one or another form. Some of them repudiate it.

Jeremy McCarter (1) has written a dazzling book, Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals, about five young radicals, including Paul and Lippmann, who did some of their most important work exactly a century ago, when the United States experienced an outpouring of left-wing thought (pp. xiv-xvi). McCarter's radicals were idealists, revolutionaries; they thought that American society had to be remade in fundamental ways (p. xvi). They were exploding with energy, humor, and wit. They loved satire, drama, and sex. They wanted to be where the action was. In offering a collection of nonpolitical poems to the public, one of them, Max Eastman, thought it necessary to provide an explanation, even an apology, which could have been the young radical's secret cri de coeur:

Life is older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the cruel system of these times, I loved it first for myself. (2) In addition to Eastman, Paul, and Lippmann, McCarter focuses on John Reed and Randolph Bourne (p. xvi). Let's explore them.

1. THE SWASHBUCKLER

   Without question, the most magnetic of McCarter's radicals is Reed--reporter, poet, and playwright, drawn to war. Was there ever a writer, or anyone, like Reed? Swashbuckling, mischievous, exuberant, and vain, he runs away with the narrative. Here's how McCarter introduces him: "John Reed prowls the docks, laughing with the sailors, chatting up the whores" (p. 9).

   Walter Lippmann knew Reed well, and in an affectionate, merciless profile, called "Legendary John Reed," he ridicules Reed's initial attempts to embrace socialism: "He made an effort to believe that the working class is not composed of miners, plumbers, and working men generally, but is a fine, statuesque giant who stands on a high hill facing the sun" (pp. 72-73). Disdaining one of the most celebrated young journalists of the time, Lippmann proclaims, "By temperament he is not a professional writer or reporter. He is a person who enjoys himself. Revolution, literature, poetry, they are only things which hold him at times, incidents merely of his living.... I can't think of a form of disaster which John Reed hasn't tried and enjoyed" (p. 73). But he also offered a tribute: "Wherever his sympathies marched with the facts, Reed was superb" (p. 73).

   Reed began his career as a poet as well as a journalist, making his reputation with jubilant, silly, memorable verses about Greenwich Village and its various bohemians: "O Life is a joy to a broth of a boy / At Forty-Two Washington Square!" (p. 15). He offered his own merciless portrait of Lippmann:

   Our all-unchallenged Chief. But were there one Who builds a world, and leaves out all the fun,-- Who dreams a pageant, gorgeous, infinite, And then leaves all the color out of it,-- Who wants to make the human race, and me, March to a geometric Q. E. D.-- Who but must laugh, if such a man there be? Who would not weep, if WALTER L. were he? (p. 16) As McCarter puts it, Reed became, for various radicals and dissidents, "part crown prince, part jester" (p. 17), and much of McCarter's book can be read as a tale of the pitched battle between Legendary John Reed, perpetually young, and that all-unchallenged Chief, middle-aged before his time. But Reed also had a serious streak. Eastman, editor of the socialist magazine The Masses, read his stories and ran them, and made him part of the journal's small, informal editorial board (p. 25). Together, they wrote the magazine's manifesto, which sounds like Reed's self-understanding:

   A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable; frank, arrogant, impertinent, searching for the true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a moneymaking press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers--there is a field for this publication in America. (3) While writing for The Masses, Reed creates scenes, literally and figuratively. With radical friends and workers, he masterminds the performance of a play, a "proof of concept of a kind of people's art," on Fifth Avenue, displaying a picket line, the shooting of a striker, and the funeral procession; the play receives national publicity. (4) He has an affair with his patron, the wealthy heiress Mabel Dodge, who falls desperately in love with him (pp. 42, 70). He becomes a war correspondent, pushing his way right to the middle of the Mexican Revolution, where he dances, drinks, and sings with the rebels who followed Pancho Villa (pp. 69-70). When war breaks out in Europe, he heads straight to Paris, "frantic to reach the front lines" (p. 69). Returning to Greenwich Village, he becomes more sincerely radical, seeing war as a "capitalist swindle" (p. 101). After Lippmann endorses Theodore Roosevelt, Reed breaks savagely with his old friend for having betrayed his radical principles and for having supported a monster (pp. 101-03). He breaks up with Dodge and falls in love with Louise Bryant, a married writer (pp. 71, 132).

   In the summer of 1916, Reed is ill with a kidney ailment, and on doctor's orders, he stops his ceaseless travelling to recover in Provincetown, Massachusetts (with Bryant) (pp. 127-28). He decides both to write and perform in plays (pp. 128-31). In fact, he "and his merrymaking comrades go a long way toward inventing serious theater in America" (p. 128). He helps to found the Provincetown Players (p. 133). He meets a young playwright with a trunk full of plays; it's Eugene O'Neill, and Reed has a part in one of the first performances of his work (p. 131). O'Neill and Reed become close friends; O'Neill has a torrid affair with Bryant (p. 132). A few months later, Reed and Bryant are married (pp. 147-48). Her affair with O'Neill continues (p. 148).

   After the United States enters World War I, Reed...