'Dissent' at 50

In the summer of 1953, the New School for Social Research hung a yellow curtain over a mural by the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco. Orozco's transgression? He had included portraits of Lenin and Stalin in the work. In response to widespread criticism, the president of the institution, Hans Simons, insisted that the decision to hang the curtain was an internal matter--"a problem of the school," which did not concern "the outside." In the first essay of the first issue of Dissent, a new left-wing quarterly, Irving Howe, the driving force behind the journal, threw himself into the controversy.

"One is not shocked at this," wrote Howe, "the language is familiar enough, go a step further and you have the American Legion or the DAR telling one to go back where you came from. But wait: The philistine reference to 'the outside' comes not from the American Legion but from the New School, the New School which began as a refuge for liberalism and freedom. Well, Dr. Simons, one is sorry to say this, but the mural is not merely 'a problem of the school'; and one would be delighted to go back where one came from: New York."

Howe's salvo exemplified the spirit of the new journal, whose chief mission was to confront the poison of McCarthyism, to combat what the editors called "the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual life of the United States," and to forge a new kind of anti-Stalinist leftism. Still, Howe's rhetorical bravado masked a certain malaise, for Dissent was a self-proclaimed socialist journal. "We shall try," Dissent's mission statement modestly noted, "to discuss freely and honestly what in the socialist tradition remains alive and what needs to be discarded or modified." The editors--who included hardened veterans of the New York intellectual scuffles of the 1930s but also refugees from Hitler's Germany--had no illusions about the task that faced them. "In America today," they wrote, "there is no significant socialist movement and...in all likelihood, no such movement will appear in the immediate future."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.