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MACDONALD, DWIGHT 1906-1982

MAGAZINE EDITOR, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR

Iconoclast

In the 1940s Dwight Macdonald was a leading voice of intellectual dissent in America. A writer of satire and biting criticism, he published nearly single-handedly a magazine called Politics, the only American intellectual journal to oppose U.S. participation in World War II. An ardent pacifist, Macdonald also championed equality for African Americans and homosexual rights.

Early Years

Macdonald was born in New York City. His father was a lawyer from a middle-class background, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy Brooklyn merchant. Looking back at his parents' happy marriage, Macdonald later spoke of "the calm, affectionate atmosphere of my boyhood home." Indeed, Macdonald enjoyed a secure, privileged childhood. He attended private elementary schools in New York City, where he began to write, and then went to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he edited the student literary magazine and became class poet. He also helped found a club called "The Hedonists," whose cultural heroes were Oscar Wilde and H. L, Mencken. In 1924 Macdonald went on to Yale University, where he majored in history and continued to pursue his literary interests. He won literary prizes, and edited the Yale Literary Magazine, the Yale Record, and wrote columns for the Yale Daily News.

Working for Fortune

After Macdonald graduated in 1928, he wanted to begin his career as a literary critic, but his father's death in 1926 forced him to provide financial help to his mother. He joined the executive training program at Macy's department store in New York but after six months realized he was poorly suited for retailing. With the help of a friend from Yale, Macdonald got a job as associate editor of Fortune magazine, which was just being launched by Henry R. Luce, another Yale graduate. The magazine flourished despite the stock market crash of 1929, and while Macdonald did not share Luce's uncritical commitment to capitalism, his years at Fortune provided him with a valuable apprenticeship in journalism. Macdonald resigned from the Fortune staff in 1936.

From Capitalist to Revolutionary

Macdonald embraced revolutionary politics in the 1930s as he began reading Karl Marx, Vladimir I. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. He later said of his political evolution, "the speed with which I evolved from a liberal into a radical and from a tepid Communist sympathizer into an ardent anti-Stalinist still amazes me." In 1937, with Philip Rahv, William Phillips, F. W. Dupree, and George L. K. Morris, he helped to revive the leftist literary magazine Partisan Review, which had been founded in 1934 and suspended publication in 1936. Taking an anti-Stalinist position while favoring revolutionary socialism, the new Partisan Review was more politically independent than the old, which had been closely linked to the Communist Party. Macdonald disagreed with his fellow editors at Partisan Review on involvement in World War II, which he firmly condemned, and resigned from the magazine in 1943.

Publishing Politics

In February 1944 Macdonald published the first issue of Politics, a magazine that he owned, published, edited, and proofread. Initially, he was also its chief contributor. According to Macdonald, the aim of Politics was "to create a center of consciousness on the Left, welcoming all varieties of radical thought." In its first two years, Macdonald explained, the magazine "forsook the true Marxist faith to whore after the strange gods of anarchism and pacificism. This was partly a matter of my own evolution…my thinking took its natural bent toward individualism, empiricism, moralism, estheticism." Politics went from a monthly to a bimonthly, and in its five years of existence it published articles of political, literary, and moral opinion. Macdonald stopped publishing Politics in 1949, in part to spend more time on his own writing.

Later Career

Macdonald continued to write for magazines such as The New Yorker, Encounter, and Partisan Review, earning a reputation as a satirist and championing a "radical humanist" outlook based on anti-authoritarianism. Against the American Grain (1962) is a collection of his cultural and literary criticism. In it he criticizes American mass culture, "which thrives not on aesthetic merit, but on marketability." During the years 1960-1966 Macdonald was a staff writer for The New Yorker and movie critic for Esquire. Later in the decade he spoke out against the Vietnam War. He remained a prolific writer and independent thinker until his death in 1982.