Introduction: a socialist magazine in the American century - 'Monthly Review'

Monthly Review, May, 1999 by Christopher Phelps

Sweezy's day before the inquisitors came in 1954 after he was summoned by the New Hampshire Attorney General to answer questions about his involvement with the Progressive Party and a guest lecture he had given at the University of New Hampshire. Sweezy refused to answer on the grounds that his political beliefs should not be subject to government inquiry. He lost at the county level and was sentenced to jail, but was set free on bail for three years as the appeal made its way through the judicial system. In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction on technical grounds as one of a series of decisions correcting the worst excesses of the McCarthy era.(26)

9.

One inadvertent legacy of the McCarthy years was the creation of Monthly Review Press. It all began with I. F. Stone's inability to find a publisher for his assessment of the official version of the Korean War. Written with humor and critical bite, the manuscript suggested that rather than being a case of simple unprovoked aggression from the North, the war - still underway at that time - had been "encouraged politically by silence, invited militarily by defensive formations, and finally set off by some minor lunges across the border," and that the truth about its precise origins lay somewhere "hidden in the murk of dispute between pro-Communists and anti-Communists."(27)

Stone had been a writer for the New York Post from 1933 to 1939, Washington correspondent of The Nation between 1940 and 1946, and writer for the New York dailies PM, the Star, and the Daily Compass from 1942 to 1952. That a journalist with his experience, ability, and ready-made audience was unable to get his book published was dramatic indication that in the realm of culture the Cold War had fallen to sub-zero temperatures. Sweezy and Huberman decided the book should see the light of day, and The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952) became the first title offered by Monthly Review Press.

When revisited in the 1960s and 1970s by students and scholars whose consciousness had been profoundly shaped by another war in Asia and who were less likely to accept the received wisdom of Cold War orthodoxy, books like Stone's won a reputation as hidden classics of critical scholarship. Stone's book also set a pattern for its publisher. In addition to issuing germinal works by Sweezy and Huberman, Monthly Review Press in its initial fifteen years tended to publish books that were critical of American foreign policy and unable to find a mainstream outlet, including Harvey O'Connor's The Empire of Oil (1955), Paul Baran's The Political Economy of Growth (1957), and William Appleman Williams's The United States, Cuba, and Castro (1963).

That ostracized texts were its mainstay should not give the impression that Monthly Review Press was for "losers" from a publishing standpoint. Take Fanshen (1966) by William Hinton. Hinton had lived in China from 1947 to 1953, initially as a UN worker. Following the 1949 revolution, he observed land reform in a village, taking more than one thousand single-spaced pages of notes. When he returned home at the height of McCarthyism, his notes were promptly confiscated by customs officials. After a lengthy court battle, Hinton retrieved his notes in 1958 and immediately began writing while working as a truck mechanic in Philadelphia. He finished the book early in 1964 but spent three unsuccessful years showing it to trade publishers in Boston and New York. Some told him frankly that it was too political. After he gave it to Monthly Review Press, the cloth edition sold out rapidly, and paperback rights were contracted to Vintage, with royalties split evenly between Hinton and Monthly Review Press. Vintage sold a staggering two hundred thousand paper copies, and Fanshen is still in print to this day, now from the University of California Press.(28)