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

Monthly Review, May, 1999 by Christopher Phelps

The career of Leo Huberman (1903-1968), seven years older than Sweezy, shows the depth of intellectual and political experience that the two brought to Monthly Review. Born and raised in New Jersey, Huby graduated from New York University in 1926, studied in England in 1933-1934, and received an M.A. from NYU in 1937. He was the author of We, the People (1932), a popular history of the United States published when he was twenty-nine, and Man's Worldly Goods (1936), a general economic history which sold more than five hundred thousand copies, as well as The Labor Spy Racket (1937) and The Great Bus Strike (1941). He held a series of positions: chair of the social sciences department in 1938-1939 at New College, an experimental unit of Columbia University's Teachers College; labor editor of the liberal paper PM in 1940-1941; columnist for U.S. Week in 1941-1942; director of public relations and education for the National Maritime Union in 1942-1945; and editor of the experimental pamphlet division of the publisher Reynal and Hitchcock in 1945-1946. Promoter, popularizer, publicist, Huberman devoted all of his considerable energies to Monthly Review until his death from a heart attack in Paris in 1968.(2)

Although Huberman and Sweezy's were the sole names on the masthead, several other people had great importance in the magazine's early life. One was Otto Nathan (1893-1987), a German emigre, former advisor to the Weimar Republic, New York University economist, and close friend of Huby's. The third founding editor, Nathan hesitated to be listed publicly on the cover, though he did write several signed articles in 1949. After that first year, Nathan parted ways with the others, but his short tenure ought not obscure his crowning achievement: obtaining a contribution for the premier issue from Albert Einstein. The physicist whose name was synonymous with genius called the establishment of Monthly Review an "important public service" at a time when "free and unhindered discussion" of socialism had fallen "under a powerful taboo."(3)

An even more crucial figure during the first fifteen years was Paul A. Baran (1910-1964). Baran was initially unknown to most readers because he used a pseudonym, Historicus. But he had a warm friendship with Sweezy dating from 1939, when he arrived in the United States from Europe after studying in Moscow, Berlin, and Frankfurt. He began writing for MR under his real name in 1956, and he gained renown around the world as the author of The Political Economy of Growth (1957), which explained the enormous discrepancy between rich and poor nations as the result of the imperialist structure of the world economy. By the early 1960s, when it began to be common to refer to an "MR school" - a term that did not always sit easily with those it purported to describe - Baran's name was almost always mentioned in the same breath with Huberman's and Sweezy's. "No parlor pinks," observed Business Week in 1963, "the trio peddles a brand of socialism that is thoroughgoing and tough-minded, drastic enough to provide the sharp break with the past that many leftwingers in the underdeveloped countries see as essential." Hired by Stanford in 1948 and tenured in 1951, Baran was probably the only publicly declared Marxist then teaching in an American department of economics, but he was treated coldly by his faculty colleagues and subjected to a salary freeze by an administration cowed by alumni pressure. Haunted by insomnia and stress, he died of a heart attack in 1965. The book he had all but finished writing with Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (1966), would become the defining theoretical reference point for a new generation of radical economists in the next ten years.(4)