The New Republic Reader: Eighty Years of Opinion and Debate. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1994 by Mark Feeney

George Orwell made no secret of his frequent irritation with the New Statesman--which in fact didn't keep him from declaring his even greater irritation over the occasional Saturday when it failed to arrive in his mailbox. Not a few of us feel the same way about The New Republic. It is maddening, wayward, obstreperous...and more or less indispensable. With its commitment to the world of ideas as well as the realm of public policy, TNR holds a unique place in our national discourse. For all that readers may lament the magazine's often snarky tone and two-decade-long creep rightward, they have no other recourse if they want a generally liberal weekly journal of opinion. (The Nation? Like National Review, it is ultimately about ideology, not politics. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or, for that matter, a good thing. But it is a different thing.)

This is the fourth anthology of selections from the magazine, the others having appeared on the 20th, 50th, and 60th anniversaries of its founding 80 years ago this November. The magazine began in 1914 as a beacon of Progressivism, a last monument of the Age of Reform. The twenties and thirties saw its growing radicalization--or quasi-radicalization. With the coming of the Depression, TNR seemed to falter. It was at once too conservative for those increasingly Marxist times yet too fellow-traveling to serve as a true liberal alternative. Even more problematic was the magazine's opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II--surely a consequence, at least in part, of its ardent support of entry into World War I. Having Henry Wallace as editor for a brief period after the war only made things worse. More significant, the emergence of Partisan Review during the forties, the newfound seriousness of The New Yorker under William Shawn during the fifties, and the arrival of The New York Review of Books in the sixties meant the back of the book came to suffer eclipse as the front had.

There were two key dates in shaping TNR as we today know it: 1950, when it moved from New York to Washington; and 1974, when Martin Peretz bought the magazine. The move emphasized the magazine's orientation toward politics and its sense of newsiness, attributes that would distinguish TNR as other "serious" publications found themselves increasingly subject to the academicization of intellectual life in postwar America. Yet at the same time, the arrival of Peretz--besides bringing in fresh blood and new money--helped bolster the magazine's always-strong connections to academe. Himself a member of the Harvard faculty, Peretz opened a pipeline to Cambridge that both enhanced relations with the professoriat and--more significant--brought a steady stream of bright young editors and reporters who have helped the magazine maintain a sharp (sometimes too sharp) rhetorical edge over the past two decades. Of course, one might argue that in doing so Peretz was simply following tradition. As Dorothy Wickenden notes in her introduction to the Reader, TNR editors have tended to be "primarily young men from Harvard unhindered by self-doubt."

In theory, a TNR anthology could double as a shadow history of 20th-century liberalism--or, more to the point, TNR's idea of what such a shadow history might be. Certainly, the Reader boasts a glittering compendium of names--Rebecca West, Randolph Bourne, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill (with a cable marking the first anniversary of FDR's death), W. H. Auden, John Dewey, John Dos Passos (famously proclaiming, "Hoover or Roosevelt, it'll be the same cops"), Margaret Sanger, Gunnar Myrdal, Lewis Mumford--but it's the names themselves that do most of the glittering, rather than what they've written. For that matter, the most famous item in the Reader, Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" appears under questionable pretenses. It ran in Cyril Connolly's Horizon two months before its TNR publication. Compounding the offense, the Reader reprints only half the essay (when it ran in TNR, it did so in two parts).

The most memorable pieces tend to come from lesser lights. Jean Daniel's interview with Castro includes his receiving the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination. "This is bad news," he says three times, and one almost expects to hear a cock crowing. Leon Wieseltier on the Holocaust Museum is at once magnificent and maddening (oh, what a high horse that man can ride, especially when, as is often the case, he's right). Alexander Bickel's tough-minded, and darkly prescient, uncredited editorial on Roe v. Wade remains as pertinent today as when written 21 years ago. And Charles Merz's account of Warren G. Harding running for president, "The Front Porch in Marion," remains as deadpan devastating as it must have been at the time. Taylor Branch is eloquent on the observance of the first Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, and Michael Kinsley's 1984 anatomization of the role of "the gaffe" in presidential campaigns (a gaffe being something that "occurs not when a politician lies, but when he tells the truth") is as amusing as it is insightful.