The New York Intellectuals

In 1945 novelist James T, Farrell in The League of Frightened Philistines, launched a jeremiad against the Popular Front which he wrote encompassed "nearly everyone but radicals." In 1939 in an article for American Mercury he wrote that "the "new cultural front hastily enlisted commercial writers, high-priced scenarists, a motley assortment of mystery-plot mechanics, humorists, newspaper columnists, stripteasers, band leaders, glamour girls, actors, press agents, Broadway producers, aging wives with thwarted literary ambitions, and other such ornaments of American culture." In 1946, Farrell, already well-known for his Studs Lonigan novels, published a new novel, Bernard Clare, about a young Chicagoan who comes to New York City hoping to become a writer.

Farrell's complaints were echoed by Dwight Macdonald in "A Theory of Popular Culture" in the first issue of his periodical Politics in 1944. In 1947 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Dialectics of Deception dared to attack Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin, two cultural icons of the Left.

Farrell and Macdonald originally were Trotskyists whose anti-Stalinist positions were motivated by a deep suspicion of state and corporate bureaucracies. They saw the rise of a bureaucratic-administrative-supervising caste as the true enemy of the worker, whether this caste was found in private corporations or within the government. They reiterated their belief in the role of the radical intellectual, combining the classic modernist position of intellectuals as an unattached, anti-bourgeois avant-garde and the Leninist notion of the vanguard intellectual who serves as a leader for the uneducated masses. Aesthetically they saw the output of the Popular Front as the work of hacks who compromised their work to satisfy the dictates either of a commercialized mass media bureaucracy or a state and party bureaucracy.

To a large extent these objections reflected the difference between the Modernists and the Proletarians. on the Left. The Modernists had been drawn to the Left in rebellion against the middle class values culture of their parents. They were the ones to whom the greatest insult was to call someone "bourgeois." The Proletarians, who largely came of age in the Depression, wanted to use the mass media to make "significant statements" while catering to popular taste. This was anathema to people like Dwight Macdonald.

These writers and those who agreed with them became known as the New York Intellectuals. The Partisan Review and other small literary and political reviews were their soapboxes. In The Laboring of Culture, marxist historian Michael Denning dismissed their belief that authenticity must come from outside the bureaucracy noting that most of the group derived their authority and renown, as well as made their living, within bureaucratic institutions. Many taught at universities and, as they became well-known, wrote for the glossy magazines and newspapers that were part of the mass media. He noted C. Wright Mill's theory that the idea of the intellectual and artist as an unattached entrepreneur was an outdated concept that applied to a very brief period of history. Most "cultural workers," as Mills called them, were employees of a bureaucracy that functioned essentially as a sales rooms and controlled access to the market. The creative team was expected to respond to the directives of an administrator who with the aid of a marketing department determined what content was distributed. A very few in the system became "stars," sufficiently in demand to have a degree of creative freedom, but only as long as they were able to stay on top of shifting market fashions and trends. Unlike Macdonald and Farrell, Mills saw this as dealing with reality and not a matter of "selling out." There was no viable alternative, although Mills called for cultural workers to seize the bureaucracies without offering any prescription as to how this could be accomplished.

The last few years has seen a challenge to this system and the cultural bureaucracies that it has engendered as technology makes the distribution of material less dependent on them. The economic model of the mass media has been shaken but a viable economic alternative has yet to emerge. It is far easier for "cultural workers' to disseminate their work but increasingly difficult for any but the "stars" to make a living.