Stevenson and the Intellectuals

For American radicals these are not times of easy political choice. They are all the more difficult if we continue to think in terms of elections, candidates and parties.

For American radicals these are not times of easy political choice. They are all the more difficult if we continue to think in terms of elections, candidates and parties. Raised, as most of us have been, in a tradition of supporting only socialist or labor candidates, we find the immediate problem of the elections perplexing: what shall we do and advise others to do? It seems obvious that the running of independent socialist candidates can, at best, have only occasional local value; the trouble with protest candidates in major elections is that they no longer register any significant protest.

Some socialists continue to favor a rigid intransigeance: no support to either of the two capitalist parties. Others say that an incipient labor-liberal party, the hope for a revived American left, is slowly growing within the loose structure of the Democratic Party, and that socialists should support this incipient movement conditionally and critically–e.g., by voting for Stevenson while making it clear that this does not mean a political bloc with the dominant liberal trend. I incline myself to the latter point of view, though with considerable hesitation; but I am strongly convinced that in the absence of any significant socialist movement, it is a problem of tenth-rate importance, almost a matter of personal choice. What is of major importance, however, is the general attitude one takes toward the dominant political drift of American society, whether one floats along or tries to maintain a sharp, fundamental criticism.

I want therefore to put aside the question of whom socialists and liberals should have voted for; I am far more concerned with the terms and the nature of the support the liberal and left intellectuals gave to Stevenson. So that if I speak harshly, as I shall, about the intellectuals, it is not here to challenge their formal choice but to evaluate the assumptions behind it and the kinds of behavior that accompanied it.

Only the eggheads surrendered unconditionally. When Adlai Stevenson made his rather cryptic remark about “egghead ecstasy,” he was registering a certain irritation with the cult that sprang up around his image in the intellectual world. Whether he objected from a principled dislike of hero worship or from a fear that it would hurt his chance with other, somewhat larger segments of the population, we don’t know. Probably he meant both. In any case he completely captured the intellectuals, not least of all those who had declared themselves irrevocably disabused with the political life.

One wonders: why this sudden burst of uncritical enthusiasm? Surely not because Stevenson was a liberal or a New Dealer; the ideological explanation seems weakest. For if it was Stevenson’s forthright liberalism that endeared him to the intellectuals, then they should have been fonder still of Truman,...