A Bomb in Every Issue

August 23, 2009 8:34 PM

The Havoc of War: How Ramparts Magazine Challenged American Culture
posted by shoesfullofdust (26 comments total)

Magazines: A Bomb in Every Issue
posted by shoesfullofdust at 8:36 PM on August 23, 2009

A third reason for Buckley’s interest in Ramparts was his affiliation with the CIA. Four years before he founded his magazine, Buckley was recruited into the agency. After training in Washington DC, he served in Mexico City as a deep cover agent.

Wow ... I had no idea.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:46 PM on August 23, 2009

Very interesting read.
posted by nola at 9:07 PM on August 23, 2009

Two related publications of that time: The East Village Other, and Evergreen Magazine.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:11 PM on August 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Fascinating article, but rushed and disjointed (e.g., it implies The National Review was fifty years old in 1967; it was only twelve years old when Scheer appeared on Firing Line); it does make me want to read the author's book.

The other thing you notice -- and this applies not just to Ramparts but to Leftism in America -- is how Jewish it is, and how fluidly some initially leftist Jews have turned into neo-conservatives (which, parenthetically may suggest why Pat Buchanan prefers to be a paleo-). The linked article mentions Ramparts contributor David Horowitz, who went on to write The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America and who now rants about "Islamofascists". All these Red Diaper Babies.

And of course, these Red Diaper Babies' ideological journeys from New Left to neo-Conservatism only mirror the same kind of journeys by a prior generation, from Old Left to Cold War Liberalism, epitomized by Trotskyite to Vietnam War supporter Max Shachtman.

By one route or another, you always seem to be able to follow all the ideological rifts in 21st Century America back to hidden fault lines existing in that ideological Pangaea, the CPUSA. Everything seems to originate in, or arise from, the nasty vicious in-fighting in the US Communist Party.
posted by orthogonality at 10:36 PM on August 23, 2009 [6 favorites]

Q: What the heck are "ramparts," anyway?

A: They are parts of a ram, and they were considered a great delicacy in those days. People used to watch o'er them.

From Dave Barry's column here.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:41 PM on August 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

orthogonality: "this applies not just to Ramparts but to Leftism in America -- is how Jewish it is, and how fluidly some initially leftist Jews have turned into neo-conservatives"

ortho, dude, that is just not polite talk, and your further Commie-baiting ... ick.
posted by mwhybark at 10:58 PM on August 23, 2009

You've studied American Leftism at all, and not seen the influence of the CPUSA -- or that the CPUSA was disproportionately Jewish (and to a lesser extent, Scandinavian)?

I'm not being pejorative, and I'm not "Commie-baiting". And the linked article itself points out:

Many of Scheer’s recruits [to Ramparts], and a significant proportion of the magazine’s new investors, were Jewish. That pattern led I.F. Stone [himself a Jew] to remark, “There haven’t been so many Jews involved in a Catholic operation since the twelve apostles.”

I'm not Jew-baiting either: I've read a number of memoirs by Red Diaper Babies (and histories of the CPUSA, and the Shachtmanites), and it's very clear in them that one thing that lead many Jews to the Party was a desire for social justice for all peoples that sprung from a reaction to the horrors of the pogroms, the grinding poverty of the tenements, and later, the Shoah. If there's a particularly "Jewish" route to the CP, it's this idea of social justice achievable in this world, not the next one, and the sort of dense hair-splitting scholarship that comes of generations of Talmud scholars laboriously teasing out the finest details of ethical rules.

I'm not saying "eeeewww Commies! bad!" -- many of these people became Communists with the very best of intentions, and many felt personally betrayed by the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the later revelations in Krushchev's secret speech, and a lot of them got their lives torn apart by Red-batiers in the 20s and the 50s.
posted by orthogonality at 11:20 PM on August 23, 2009 [8 favorites]

Very interesting read. It never occurred to me that Rolling Stone grew out of such a publication. Mother Jones, I might have had an inkling.

What is so interesting to me in all this is how this was all NEW at this point. There hadn't been a wide-circulation glossy which was feeding hardcore liberal ideas (and paranoia?) into the world. It was all either underground 'zines or just didn't exist. A lot of these ideas were probably ones which would have led to arrest just a couple of decades before. And the culture jamming aspects of the publication are pretty fascinating, too.

There really was a time when a magazine could captivate with its ideas. Hard to imagine from where we stand today.

And really? Jewish Communists from the 50s turned into Pat Buchanan? Does someone need their lithium levels checked?
posted by hippybear at 11:34 PM on August 23, 2009

And really? Jewish Communists from the 50s turned into Pat Buchanan? Does someone need their lithium levels checked?

Jewish Communists from the 50s turned into Norman Podhoretz, Morton Kondracke and Irving Kristol. Same damn thing.
posted by univac at 11:44 PM on August 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Anyone have a link to video of the Scheer vs. Buckley Firing Line episode? Sounds like a fun time.
posted by univac at 11:45 PM on August 23, 2009

And really? Jewish Communists from the 50s turned into Pat Buchanan?

Yes and no: Pat's a Paleocon, and putting it charitably, not particularly pro-Jewish.

But many of the Neocons and war-hawks started out as Leftists or New Leftists (or Straussians).

They're called neoconservatives because originally they were on the left -- either liberal or Leftist; they were with or to the left of FDR. Irving Kristol, the ideological father of neo-conservatism (and birth father of Bill, in turn the founder of PNAC), explained a neoconservative is "a liberal who has been mugged by reality."
posted by orthogonality at 12:07 AM on August 24, 2009

And Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's thoroughly anti-Communist Ambassador to the UN, before she turned from Democrat to Republican, was a member of the Young People's Socialist League. Around the time Max Shachtman was breaking with Leon Trotsky.

Really, you can't understand modern neoconservatism without understanding its grounding in the the CPUSA.

If it doesn't inherit the ideology (and in some way it does), it does inherit a particular world-view that should be anathema to any Burkean conservative -- the idea that the world is perfectible, that societies slowly and organically accreted over generations can be remade by mere men in a few short years -- this very anti-conservative idea is at the heart of PNAC, the impetus behind the Iraq War, the glorious unattainable visions of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol.
posted by orthogonality at 12:26 AM on August 24, 2009 [9 favorites]

Yeah, I can grok the influence of the PNAC and the horrors it has wrought upon the face of the globe. I just find it really difficult to understand how people who (purportedly) once believed that all people everywhere deserve a fair and equal shake in life can warp into the kind of nationalistic hate-mongers most of the people you name seem to be. But then, what I do I know? I'm mostly a lost hippie soul, confused by the lack of love around me.
posted by hippybear at 12:39 AM on August 24, 2009

I just find it really difficult to understand how people who (purportedly) once believed that all people everywhere deserve a fair and equal shake in life can warp into the kind of nationalistic hate-mongers most of the people you name seem to be.

This usually happens when people who are lacking in insight and self-reflection get their hands on some money.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:54 AM on August 24, 2009 [2 favorites]

I just find it really difficult to understand how people who (purportedly) once believed that all people everywhere deserve a fair and equal shake in life can warp into the kind of nationalistic hate-mongers most of the people you name seem to be.
Authoritarian communists found the working class let them down by not following the party's programme. Since their instincts were really to power rather than justice or liberation, they moved on to serve a different force of history.
posted by Abiezer at 1:00 AM on August 24, 2009 [4 favorites]

Where can you find reporting like that today?
posted by atchafalaya at 2:24 AM on August 24, 2009

Authoritarian communists found the working class let them down by not following the party's programme. Since their instincts were really to power rather than justice or liberation, they moved on to serve a different force of history.

This may describe the Straussians ("noble lies") crowd. I'm less sure it's a full explanation for others. So much of American intellectual life in the 20th century derives from the shtetl, just as Abolition, Trancendentalism, and Utopianism in the 19th Century almost always seems ultimately traceable to those Calvinist religious nuts, the Puritans, who settled Massachusetts Bay expecting it to be the New Zion.*

Of course part of that is the influence of Zionism and Jewish anti-Zionism, and the larger implied question of separate destiny or assimilation, Communism the world-wide triumph of the proletariat or Eretz Israel's restoration of one Chosen People.

But over and over we see first and second generation Jewish immigrants addressing themselves to questions of social justice -- grounded in the very practical questions posed by the tenement and sweatshop, not "merely" theoretical, but informed by the same passion for theological debate, the same need to cry out, "God, why'd you have to choose us" that informed the Torah scholars -- the Torah scholars, and often Orthodox rabbis from some small town in the Pale of Settlement, who it turns out are the Socialists and Communists grandparents.

(E.g, Socialist "Michael Gold"'s memoir/polemic/propaganda piece Jews Without Money.)

I don't think these people were motivated by power -- I think they truly wanted to do good -- or more accurately, justice --, and right wrongs, and do so in a universal way that could embrace all workers regardless of race or creed.

And of course, then too many sacrifice their years, and lives, and some their souls, to a vile police informant from Georgia.

* Obviously, for the second half of that comparison, I'm riffing on Stanley Elkins (historian Elkins with an "s", not the Jewish novelist Stanley Elkin without an "s").
posted by orthogonality at 2:59 AM on August 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

Fair points, it was a quick sectarian jibe and I defer to your obviously better knowledge of the American experience, although:
I don't think these people were motivated by power -- I think they truly wanted to do good -- or more accurately, justice --, and right wrongs, and do so in a universal way that could embrace all workers regardless of race or creed.
My sense is that even had they been in the tenements and sweatshops, the 'good' became an abstraction divorced from lived reality of the working class; the pursuit of power follows because it's enough to deliver this abstract regardless of what 'the proletariat' are or aren't demanding. And that amounts to the same thing in the end, particularly as once cut free from any anchor in working class aspirations, what's good or just can drift off anywhere, and did indeed find some strange harbours.
If that's wrong I would be interested in your take on the transition.
posted by Abiezer at 3:31 AM on August 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

No, I think you're on target with your restatement, at least for some. Exactly -- once "the good" becomes an abstraction, a commodity, you can rationalize that your duplicity or evil now is necessary for you to take/retain the power to do a greater good later. The end justifies any means, if the end is important enough.

And eventually the end is pretty banal: Comrade Brezhnev's caviar is "necessary" to his comfort is necessary to his functioning as superlatively as he does, so Brezhnev's caviar is a national security issue.
posted by orthogonality at 4:14 AM on August 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

What is so interesting to me in all this is how this was all NEW at this point. There hadn't been a wide-circulation glossy which was feeding hardcore liberal ideas (and paranoia?) into the world.

You can't exaggerate the tremendous influence Ramparts had at the time. Each issue did seem to have some life-changing bomb. For me, the it was their way-in-advance photos and article on the nascent hip (soon to be hippie and psychedelic) scene in San Francisco. It was a siren song that went straight to the heart. (And the editors of Rampart were ignorant commie bastards and panders for Black Panther thugs, too, just like David Horowitz says. In those days, as in ours, evil was coming at you in so many directions, it was possible to be a good guy and bad guy at the same time. Like William F. Buckley.)
posted by Faze at 4:25 AM on August 24, 2009

Ramparts was a great magazine; it's a pity that today's America has no place for a similar phenomenon. (Great historical/cultural analysis, by the way, ortho.)

> And the editors of Rampart were ignorant commie bastards and panders for Black Panther thugs, too

Preemptive: DNFTT.
posted by languagehat at 6:03 AM on August 24, 2009

Note to readers: the pages are out of order. Page 2 is really 4 or 5, I think.

Here's some prophecy from MLK:

“If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”

posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:58 AM on August 24, 2009

And then there's the Hunter S. Thompson connection.
posted by Relay at 7:08 AM on August 24, 2009

Thank you, Relay. That explains the Henry Luce reference in the FPP article. I was having some trouble with the image of Time magazine's publisher eating Thompson's stash and having his stomach pumped by a veterinarian, although HST's subsequent comments about Luce made perfect sense.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 7:43 AM on August 24, 2009

Irving Kristol, the man who put the “neo” into conservatism, is dead at the age of 89... WSJ...Wash Post... NYT... Myron Magnet... AP...Wash Times... John Podhoretz... James Q. Wilson... Charles Murray... Forbes... Seth Lipsky... Christopher Hitchens... David Brooks... John Guardiano... Christopher DeMuth

Links via Arts and Letters Daily
posted by maggieb at 9:25 AM on September 23, 2009