Louis C. Fraina/Lewis Corey and The Crisis of the Middle Class

Paul Buhle's latest anthology The American Radical (co-edited with Mari Jo Buhle and Harvey Kaye) was published in Spring 1994 by Routledge. His biography, A Dreamer's Paradise Lost: Louis Fraina/Lewis Corey, will be published by Humanities Press. This essay appears, in another version, as the introduction to a new edition of Lewis Corey's Crisis of the Middle Class to be published by Columbia University Press in the Fall of 1994.

THE NAME OF LOUIS FRAINA (OR AS HE CALLED HIMSELF LATER, LEWIS COREY) IS virtually unknown today. A vignette from Warren Beatty's Reds featured Paul Sorvino as Fraina, the youthful ideologue, at the 1919 founding convention of the Communist Party. But the significance of the radical immigrant orator was almost certainly lost on most of the film's audience. Who would have guessed that the same Fraina had been only a few years earlier an editor of Modern Dance magazine, a Marxist champion of jazz dancing, or a leading writer for the cerebral bohemian New Review, celebrating free-verse poetry? Who would connect him with another forgotten figure, Lewis Corey, a famed radical economist of the 1930s and liberal critic of the 1940s? For a select group of readers (mostly scholars of American radicalism), Theodore Draper's Roots of American Communism had briefly brought Fraina/Corey back to a smaller but respectable prominence, from which he faded once again. But Draper's Fraina/Corey, seen as youthful victim of false hopes for revolutionary change and a sadder but wiser Cold War ideologue, did little to revivify the complexity or the promise of the 1910s and 1930s, or the inwardness of the protagonist among them.¹

The real Lewis Corey was born Luigi Carlo Fraina, in Galdo (Salerno), Italy, in 1892. Brought to the U.S. at an early age, he grew up in the slum section of Manhattan known as Hell's Kitchen. An undersized and often sickly "Louis" Fraina went to work selling newspapers at age six, later assisted his mother in a tobacco factory and still later worked as a boot black. In slightly more favorable conditions, the brilliant boy -- an autodidact novel-reader and valedictorian of his grade school class -- could have risen swiftly upward through formal education. But life cheated him. His formal schooling ended when his father died and he was forced to become the primary breadwinner of the family.

Fraina turned personal misfortune into radical idealism and was soon seeking intellectual outlets. He began contributing in 1909 to the Truth Seeker, dreaming aloud in that free-thought weekly of a better world, free of prejudice and superstitions. The same year, he became a socialist.

It was one of those rare, optimistic moments for the American Left. For nearly a decade the Socialist Party, under its beloved leader Eugene V. Debs, had worked to educate ordinary Americans not to fear socialist doctrine. Branches of the party published dozens of newspapers in many languages, gained a foothold in factory towns and the many large cities outside the Old South, and cultivated a large rural following in the Southwest. It elected hundreds of local officials to office. But according to its critics -- and Fraina was quickly one of them -- the party had made too many concessions to the presumed sources of membership, compromising Marxian doctrines and methods of organization with middle class tastes and (Protestant) religious inclinations. A true proletarian organization could do better. The "new immigrant" workers from Southern and Eastern Europe, engaged in widespread strikes from 1909 onward, seemed to him the key constituency in every way, if only the proper political-industrial vessel could be found for their mobilization.

Fraina converted to the small and sectarian Socialist Labor Party, staying until 1912. Rising through its thin ranks as a street-corner agitator, he joined the minuscule staff of the party's newspaper, The Daily People, working almost literally at the right hand of the charismatic party leader, Daniel DeLeon. In that capacity, Fraina became heir to a very particular left tradition. DeLeon, an outstanding socialist figure during the 1890s but now badly reduced and in his final years of life, had palpably failed to build a political organization. But he had developed a remarkable quasi-anthropological view of modern society. According to DeLeon, all the history of socialism to date had been mere prologue. Where modern industry had organized society around itself -- above all in the United States -- the political form of the state had been outmoded and the effort to capture it a fruitless task. The modern working class was uniquely constituted to supersede the state's present function through a government of freely-constituted governing councils. The ordinary masses, taught to understand their own power, were being prepared by life (with the help of a socialist educational body) to liberate all society, all art, indeed all creative impulses, from their historical integument.²

Fraina abandoned the SLP by 1913, but he retained for a lifetime certain key elements of his experience. He moved on meanwhile to a variety of pursuits, at once elaborating a vision of a freer future order and an increasingly precise view of the society at hand. As a staff member of the New Review magazine, arguably the first left-wing publication specifically for American intellectuals, Fraina rubbed shoulders with Columbia University intellectuals and Greenwich Village bohemians, anthropologists, psychologists and cultural critics, from Robert Lowie to W.E.B. DuBois. As a managing editor and contributor to Modern Dance magazine, he found himself exploring the social role of jazz and popular arts, enraptured with performances of the "Divine Isadora" Duncan and enraged by the high-brow critics' indifference to the most creative elements in vernacular American culture.³

His remarkable volume, Revolutionary Socialism (1918), explicated the more sociological element of this broad perspective. Capitalism, Fraina argued, was passing through its laissez-faire, competitive period into a newer epoch of regulated capitalism and expansive empire. In the "progressive" or regulatory politics of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson he found the "clear and consistent formulation of the requirements of the new era of controlled industry and collectivist Capitalism." Centralization of the executive apparatus and the national government at large and coordination of all forces including labor and capital had rendered the old socialism of Debs's party utterly obsolete.

FRAINA ACUTELY SAW THAT, CONTRARY TO WIDELY-HELD EXPECTATIONS, CAPITALISM was not about to collapse from its own anarchic tendencies. The middle classes, rather than disappearing, had divided into the fading small proprietor section and the rising army of white collar employees. Like the skilled working class, this last sector had far more to lose than its chains. It looked upon itself, increasingly, as part of America's economic empire which overpowered (and steadily replaced) European-style colonialism and recycled a considerable portion of the profits on the home front.

The self-trained thinker Fraina, painfully aware of the elite backgrounds and personal connections which brought young men to the New Republic and the other liberal opinion magazines, was especially critical of the intellectuals' muted criticisms of the system. Socially, the cultural climate had grown more emancipating for the individual and especially the new middle class. But politically, it rewarded the loyalty of those who supported the U.S. entry into World War I.

Fraina saw his subjects clearly, anticipating in many respects the objections that Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, Randolph Bourne and a bevy of other thinkers would soon levy against the defects of a business-oriented liberalism.⁴ He considered the issues of democracy more deeply than they did in important areas, for he concretely posed the questions of mass participation in the present and future order. He had very early glimpsed the promiseful emergence, what he called a "new racial type," a multi-cultural figure of the Americas, free of Europe's historical constraints and prepared by experience for a truly democratic transformation of society.⁵ His writings on subjects ranging from free verse and graphic Futurism to the social possibilities of dance often hint at a fuller development of this idea, with the intersection of popular culture and modernism as the key juncture. These contributions remain stunning for their precocious premonitions. But Fraina, the immigrant boy, was above all committed to socialist revolution -- and in 1917, Russia called.

Here lay the chief tragedy of Fraina's life. For the vigorous young journalist, critic and activist as for millions around the world, the initial reports from Russia presented a vision of proletarian revolution fulfilled. After all, veteran radicals observed, the Soviets ("workers councils" in Russian) had the look and sound of the Industrial Workers of the World. John Reed, Fraina's sometime associate and sometime political rival, said so with special elegance in the reportorial Ten Days that Shook the World.

Fraina gave himself to this moment in history, heart and soul. Decades later, after the most severe disillusionment, he still had not shaken the incubus which directed him away from his own unique analytical approach to economics, politics and culture. Even as Communism's fierce opponent, he remained locked into the narrowed logic of the intellectual debate between liberalism and Stalinism.

Fraina thus edited Proletarian Revolution in Russia, the first collection of documents to appear in English about the Bolshevik Revolution. He also edited, during 1917 from Boston, the first newspaper in the English-speaking world which could claim to be the voice of the Bolsheviks (not only in ideas but personally, by way of the paper's sponsors, Latvian exiles close to Lenin). He lectured and wrote furiously, attracting wide interest within Left circles. He also went to jail heroically, if briefly, for avowed draft resistance. When the Socialist Party membership voted for a new slate of executive officers in 1919, Fraina (who had only recently rejoined the organization) finished at the top of the list. He seemed, more than ever, to have a brilliant future before him.

But this was an altogether misleading picture of reality. Fraina's supporters, the immigrants from Eastern Europe who streamed into the Socialist party, looked mainly toward world revolution and especially the events in their various homelands. Neither he nor they had much appreciation for the complexity of developments on the domestic front, where both anti-war sentiment and labor activity surged forward. In the glare of the Russian events and the light of growing government repression, this looked not so much like a large-scale social upheaval with its own unique creative logic as the merest premonition of European-style uprisings soon to follow.⁶

Disoriented, Fraina stumbled badly. He fell captive to enthusiasts who compulsively created an imitation Russian Bolshevik party, indifferent to the political costs along the way. He looked superficially impressive as one of the most Americanized figures and precocious intellects among the leaders of the Communist Party in 1919. But his chosen movement, torn by its own internal wrangling as much as by the unprecedented wave of political repression from federal and state authorities, collapsed as the ranks of radicals shrank within two years from more than a hundred thousand activists to a few thousand mostly at each others' throats. While Communist publications spent their energy in polemical internecine warfare (and government agents swept in to close newspapers and wreck offices, preparing government cases for imprisonment and deportation), the demoralized radical ranks let slip their chance to consolidate their wide influence among the restless workers, farmers, African-Americans, European ethnic groups and others.⁷

Bad quickly went to worse amid the climate of sectarian excitements. Fraina was accused, by an admitted former government agent, of being a police spy! In this thoroughly bizarre circumstance where Fraina found himself, in turn, defended by another federal agent, his usefulness had all but vanished. One last hope remained in the Mecca of revolution: Moscow. A trip to the Soviet Union to see things for himself and to clear his name brought him moments of unforgettable intensity. Lenin, in a personal interview with Fraina, agreed to collaborate on a Russian edition of DeLeon's essays. Fraina boldly addressed the Comintern still operating at fever pitch of world-revolutionary expectations. Bedeviled by controversies at home, and increasingly aware that his positions could not be sustained, he lost badly. Intuitively, Fraina anticipated the degeneration of internationalism that the consolidation of Stalin's grip would make final in a few years.

Shunted aside by Comintern leaders, Fraina was sent on a fool's errand to Mexico. Ordered to guide a non-existent Communist movement there into a fantasized revolutionary climax, he marked time and badly missed a Russian wife he had left behind in Moscow. He joined her in New York, crossing the border under an assumed name and abandoning his career a professional revolutionary. He worked as a copy editor for the New York Times and elsewhere under the name of "Joseph Skala," and eagerly embraced something he had hardly known previously: a private life. With the birth of a beloved daughter, he had become a family man.

HERE, A CRUCIAL PHASE FOR HIS NEW LIFE AND FOR LATER WORKS BEGAN IN several different ways. As he recalled in unpublished memoirs, he looked at American life anew through his wife's eyes and his own. What he saw was not by any means an ideal society, but a society with great democratic energies. It blindly denied itself, however, the potentialities it might achieve with foresight and planning. The writer "Lewis Corey" (as he called himself, using initials from his name), emerged as if from nowhere in 1926 to expose the shallowness of capitalism's "New Era," and to suggest better alternatives.

In the pages of the New Republic most prominently, and in smaller venues like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' weekly paper, The Advance, the self-taught economist Corey carefully used statistics to show that prosperity was based on speculation, its fruits barely reaching the poor. "The ideology and practice of individual acquisition, accumulation and concentration are now ascendent," he warned, adding sarcastically, "Let us produce and accumulate: there are no social problems! But there is an awakening coming."⁸ Better than any professional economist, he had predicted the causes of the coming Depression, anticipating by several years the famous volume by Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property.⁹

Lewis Corey had placed himself, one would think, perfectly for the economic crash and the rise of social movements to follow. Indeed, while he made a meager living as a writer and lesser editor at the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences between 1931 and 1934, his reputation grew sufficiently for him to go on the road as a modestly successful public lecturer. The Modern Monthly, outstanding independent voice of radical intellectuals, enthroned him during these years as a leading political contributor. An intelligent historical study, The House of Morgan (1930), received good notices as a fair-minded interpretation of monopoly's rise in post-Civil War America.

But Corey had several almost overwhelming frustrations. His magnum opus, The Decline of American Capitalism (1934), was greeted as "Radicalism's Complete Handbook" or the volume which demonstrated the adaptability of Marxian ideas to U.S. conditions.¹⁰ Noted labor economist John R. Commons further described its author as the "first Marxian economist to reduce the Marxian theory to quantitative terms."¹¹ He had managed only to get a small commercial house to publish the volume, and readers found the book at any rate too overwhelming in length, too turgid in prose, to swallow whole. Most also found its thematic finality, predicting absolute capitalist breakdown, far too pessimistic a few years later, when the New Deal and the fear of fascism made "bourgeois democracy" look much better than before.

Corey also inevitably failed in his efforts to reconcile with the Communist Party. Expecting to re-enter at a leadership level, he made himself the outstanding figure in the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, the Communist presidential slate in 1932. Seeking to create an independent-minded milieu of intellectuals, Corey ran into the sectarian roadblock which stymied so many others. Communist leaders often tolerated a limited degree of organizational latitude during other historical eras. But during this early 1930s moment of renewed revolutionary expectation (reminiscent, ironically, of Daniel DeLeon's approach decades earlier), they deeply feared potential competition and practically demonized any suspected free agent. Unlike a group of younger intellectuals who navigated through Trotskyism into the prestigious circles of the New York Intellectuals, Corey had no interest in lesser political entities and no potent alliances. Despite his accomplishments, he found himself surprisingly alone. Yet all these experiences, good and bad, had been perhaps necessary for the unique effort to create his one best-selling volume, Crisis of the Middle Class.

Hailing Crisis at its 1935 appearance, Columbia University economic historian Louis Hacker described the "Addresses to the Middle Class" as both a foremost intellectual accomplishment and an important political challenge. Corey, now "undoubtedly the most important Marxist writer in the United States today," had the independence to "pursue his thought wherever it may lead him" and the skill to jettison Marxist "official seminar terminology" for a lucid style so that masses of ordinary Americans could understand his work. Alan Angoff wrote similarly, in the Boston Evening Transcript, that the book proved Corey to be the "best informed and most thoroughly communistic of all current American economists." Playwright Clifford Odets, then at the height of his precocious renown, was quoted as saying the book seemed to be a "statistical version" of his Paradise Lost. The release of Crisis of the Middle Class actually made the front page of the New York Post, and the book briefly reached the best-seller list. A bright future evidently awaited the author.¹² Few readers guessed that Lewis Corey had been Fraina; still fewer of his new army of admirers suspected that Corey's days as a celebrated author were finished.

UNBOUND TO ANY CHILIASTIC REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY, PURSUING HIS OWN INTELlectual leads, he interested himself increasingly in what European socialists had traditionally called "American Exceptionalism." Existing Marxian models, he concluded, could not really explain the particular trajectory of U.S. society. Although Corey clearly refrained from jettisoning claims to Marxist methodology, he sought to produce an original analysis with the proletariat no longer at the center of the picture.

His perspective was less strictly original, in some respects, than he might have believed. As he moved from economics to history and especially U.S. history, Corey assimilated the "Progressive" historiography which had been predominant since the 1910s. Highlighted by the writings of Charles Beard, it had framed the American saga in terms of "interests," less like permanent class formations and more like competing and often geographically-based strata such as merchants and farmers. In Beard's model, egalitarian-minded settlers had continuously resisted the imposition of European-style rule by monopolists based in Eastern cities. Toward the end of the 19th century -- coinciding with the end of the frontier -- the emerging banking and industrial capitalists had quashed the last major agrarian threat. But the middle (and to a lesser degree, the lower) classes, shocked by the growing inequalities, waste and corruption of society, began the long road back to modern liberalism. For Beard's intellectual history counterpart, V.L. Parrington, the sparks of liberation had similarly passed from Jeffersonians to Concord litterateurs and Abolitionists to the literary realists and finally, the radical intelligentsia -- all of them based fundamentally in the middle class.¹³

In Crisis of the Middle Class, Corey sought to sharpen the class analysis of this perspective without falling back into the vulgarizations of garden variety American Marxism. The middle class, its general situation continually shifting with the stage through which society was passing, had revealed internal fissures from the beginning of capitalist hegemony. Those in the lower stratum became petty-bourgeois radicals, continually waging war against monopoly, for the right of everyone to be small property owners. As such, they constituted the driving force of the bourgeois revolution (i.e., the Revolutionary War). But as an intermediate force they could not hold power. Taking up the most iconoclastic view of the Progressive historians, Corey insisted that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had been a sort of self- legalized coup d'état to consolidate the influence of large property owners. Thus the ideals of equality and democracy, just as elsewhere in the Western world, were realized only in part, and threatened with further degradation by newer requirements of capitalism.

Developing his argument historically, Corey continued one particular thread from Decline of American Capitalism. As the inevitable economic crisis of capitalism had in his earlier book been dramatically delayed by the existence of the frontier, so here the various ill effects of monopoly had been postponed and even reversed, for several generations, by a frontier-based middle class whose rise made the "struggle for democratic rights irresistible." (p.115). The delay of U.S. entry into global imperialism that Corey had earlier seen as a byproduct of the frontier experience became here something very different. The vitality of frontier democracy made the related delay in the rise of working class awareness considerably less important than the activities and consciousness of "the people," a far more general category. Democracy, strengthened by the frontier experience, stood against Empire.

Yet class had not disappeared, only taken on new dimensions. The consolidation of industrial capitalism inevitably eroded the old, small property-owning bourgeoisie and created the "new" middle class of propertyless white-collar workers, as in Fraina's Revolutionary Socialism. The failure of Populism and then Progressivism -- which Corey styled the "final expression of middle class revolt" (p.135) posed the current dilemma. Further resistance against monopolism required alliance with the working class, which had previously played little role in Corey's narration. Once on the stage, it occupied a curiously sudden and crucial if also largely inert role. The contradictions of fully-developed monopoly capitalism in the 1910s had prompted the upper ends of the middle class toward their social betters for regulation of the system and, if necessary, repression of the restless workers. The lower element looked more toward its "natural" ally, the rapidly increasing mass of factory operatives.

Corey made a noticeable argument for optimism, while decisively reframing Fraina's insights about this very worker. As individualism and freedom of enterprise became outmoded ideals, collectivism had grown organically within daily life. If ordinary people already engaged in productively socialized (if privately owned) production and distribution, the alteration necessary lay more and more obviously within the particulars of social relations.

BUT THIS WAS A TROUBLED THESIS. THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY FREEDOM OF IDEAS and mass behavior that he thought he had glimpsed in Modern Dance magazine had slipped away, as they did to most observers keen to the cultural conservatism of the 1930s.¹⁴ Borrowing from a favorite source of the 1930s, William Ogburn's thesis of a "cultural lag" in social consciousness, Corey insisted that cultural changes impending could liberate people to enjoy qualitatively different lives -- but only after resolution of the economic-political crisis allowed them the opportunity to do so. He also tempered yesterday's optimism with warnings. A democratic socialism did not come from economic equations alone. If the Left failed to appeal to the new middle class as it had failed in the past, this class might well turn toward fascism. The outcome depended substantially upon the historical bearer of socialism in Europe and elsewhere, the working class. But it depended -- one would gather from the emphases of Corey's argument -- even more upon the general reassertion of Enlightenment ideals, the challenge to society to move forward and not backward. Although Corey did not quite say so, this challenge would best be understood by the middle class intellectual such as himself.

Crisis of the Middle Class is fascinating for its conglomeration of intentions, its vaguely articulated or (as a later generation would say) "under-theorized" attempt to combine Marxist and traditional liberal goals with historical materialism and Beardian notions of American progress. Another self-trained economist, William Blake, shrewdly suggested that Corey would have done better to have reorganized facts and arguments, combining the book with Decline of American Capitalism, for "in that changed setting his two books could become extremely valuable for the American scene."¹⁵

That possibility would probably never have occurred to Corey, racing from one class subject (and more subtly, one socialist politics) to another within a few years. Decline had, after all, been written to prepare readers for capitalism's ultimate decline and for a revolution transformation; Crisis suggested a less-than-final crisis in the system, with a protracted "war of positions" until the issues could be resolved. Similarly, he had pursued to their logical conclusions the least Marxian strains of his economic analysis in The Decline. Rather, the crisis of capitalism was -- just as the orthodox liberal economists believed -- a crisis of abundance, from an excess of profits which could not be invested profitably. Corey's argument now differed from theirs mainly in the prediction of outcome.¹⁶

Finally, Corey had practically abandoned Fraina's vision of a revolution which replaced the political state with a non-coercive, administrative apparatus. As a Fraina-like theorist would complain in a few years about Communist thinkers, Corey had substituted critiques of property ownership for critiques of the process of production, and thereby shifted the situation of the working class from the subject to the object.¹⁷ This view of socialism as the fulfillment of an old and even bourgeois dream was not, in fact, very far from Communist leader Earl Browder's description of socialism as the "Americanism of the Twentieth Century." Corey had joined a broad intellectual current which shared many of the predilections of the Communists' Popular Front without adopting its credulity toward the Soviet Union or its faith in domestic Communist leadership.

Coming in 1935, as fears of fascism spread like wildfire, The Crisis struck just the right note for most reviewers. One might say, indeed, that the book's weaknesses were strengths in the eyes of readers. Themselves quietly abandoning chiliastic views of revolution (and along with them most of the Marxian pretensions), middle class radical intellectuals grasped Corey as an ideal link between the ideals of the Left and the legacy of American liberalism.

Amidst the enthusiastic responses to the book, a few critics offered more cautious or ironic observations. The New York Times' John Chamberlain, reviewing Crisis with the counterpart volume, Insurgent America, by the radical but anti-socialist Alfred Bingham, reflected that for the last few years Bingham had been "running away from the communists, [while] the Left theoreticians like Mr Corey have been running towards Mr Bingham."¹⁸ If revolution was off the agenda, moral appeal to the middle classes was on.

Although many of the book's particulars have been proven wrong, its general thesis nevertheless remains provocative. The fate of a troubled democracy is tied to a middle class both hugely variegated and deeply conflicted. The middle stratum as a group admires or envies those formations above even as it sees the damage wrought by the continuing concentrations of wealth and influence; it fears those multitudes below even as it perceives the demoralization of society at large through the spread of poverty, hopelessness and violence. Acutely aware of vapid materialism yet craving security, it drifts to apathy and pessimism, escape into a personal life. Despite the wide range of sociological and historical literature touching on the middle class, none has focused upon the basic dilemmas more clearly or eloquently than this volume.¹⁹

FOR JUST A MOMENT, IT SEEMED THE COMMUNISTS THEMSELVES HAD BEEN CONverted by Corey. Shocked by Roosevelt's growing appeal among the ethnic working class and impelled toward liberalism by the Comintern's declaration of a Popular Front against Fascism, they greeted Crisis of the Middle Class warmly. The New Masses called it "a book you should get at once and one you should persuade all of your middle class acquaintances to read."²⁰ In a marvelous stroke of irony, Crisis was given away free in a special offer with New Masses subscriptions, while Communist bookstores now offered copies of Crisis for sale with a pamphlet attacking Decline of American Capitalism added as a combination bonus and advanced antidote for that book's errors.

But this moment of amity proved as false as the rest. Inviting Corey to serve as a guest editor of a special "Middle Class" number of the New Masses, the editors pulled the rug out from under him in the process of production, making him a nominal "chairman" of the editorial committee for what was a disappointingly narrow issue.²¹

This incident along with world events precipitated a final disillusionment with Communism. Corey, Louis Hacker, self-taught historian Bertram D. Wolfe, art historian Meyer Schapiro and others set out to create an independent Marxist theoretical journal, the Marxist Quarterly. After several provocative issues, it foundered in 1936-37 upon the rocks of the Moscow Trials, with its pro-Russian financial angel removing his subsidy. Corey's own Marxism had virtually expired already, and he grappled to find a place for himself. Working a few months at the Works Projects Administration in Washington, he signed on as Educational Director of Local 22, International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York, a particular bastion of anti-Communist union leadership. Growing increasingly restless during several years there, he pursued other possibilities and by 1940 published in the Nation a three-part manifesto, "Marxism Reconsidered."²²

He now proclaimed views immanent but unarticulated in Crisis. Marxian doctrine had disguised the vital importance of appealing to all functional groups, blue and white collar workers, technicians and farmers alike. Capitalism could be peacefully transformed if only Americans learned "to use the democratic state, overcome its class nature and limitations, democratize it still further with greater popular controls, and increase its constructive services."²³ Max Shachtman commented that if Corey promised to put teeth into the doctrine of "gradualism," in reality "Mr. Corey's teeth, and those of most middle-class radicals, are chattering with fright in the growing totalitarian darkness."²⁴

This comment was uncharitable, but not entirely unfair. At first polemically opposed to U.S. entry into the Second World War, Corey (like many other intellectuals) swung around to an extreme pro-interventionist view and into alliance with others who shared his perspectives. Joining theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, union leader A. Philip Randolph and others, Corey established the Union of Democratic Action (UDA) in 1940. By now a veteran author of manifestoes and organizer of intellectuals, he played a key role in this fledgling organization until it faded a few years later. He also prepared a volume of essays, The Unfinished Task: Economic Reconstruction of Democracy (1942), summing up his thoughts since Crisis.

The lack of reception for this book showed how far the political climate had shifted in seven years. Intent upon the war itself and losing focus on the once-numerous proposals to construct a post-capitalist economy, intellectuals met The Unfinished Task with indifference. Corey had apparently been the first to coin the phrase "mixed economy." But it was an idea never credited to him, perhaps because he had meant a "socialist" mixed economy with the cooperative sector firmly in control, a vision that centrist-drifting liberals steadily abandoned. As in the case of Corey's role in the UDA, he also seems to have been denied credit by virtue of his unsavory "red" past which had by this time become fairly common knowledge. Histories of the Americans for Democratic Action, the UDA's influential liberal successor, simply discarded him from memory.²⁵

Corey, who had always lacked a stable occupation, found a home at Antioch College, teaching there until 1949. A sometimes controversial campus figure, he was also a dynamic lecturer, especially when recalling the joy and naivete of the 1910s radicalism that he had experienced in a far more hopeful moment of the century. Although suffering a stroke in 1943 and warned against overexertion, he threw himself back into the political fray in 1946-47. Appealing for a people's party to the left of the Democrats (but rigidly excluding the Communists), he led the creation of the National Educational Committee for a New Party. Its honorary chairman, John Dewey, had during the 30s headed a similar third-party effort that Corey then regarded as too moderate. By now, with the resurgent economy and the rise of the Cold War, the same idea had become too radical by far. In 1948, only former vice-president Henry Wallace -- along with a handful of conservative Republicans -- opposed Harry Truman's combining military build-up and economic expansion in a plan that sounded curiously like the state capitalism that young Fraina had lambasted.

Corey spent the last years of his life in extreme turmoil. Writing Meat and Man (1950), an exuberant history of the industry and its workers, led Corey to leave Antioch for the familiar post of union educational director at the Amalgamated Butcher Workmen in Chicago. This time, however, he seemed almost immediately unhappy at work he considered routine and limiting. He poured his energies into journalism, mainly in the New Leader, articulating harsh views which seemed increasingly the mirror-image opposite of Louis Fraina's perspectives on capitalism and empire. He outlined never-to-be realized book projects, such as a dictionary of American labor biography. Most remarkably, he also devised a book-length manuscript for a popular history of Frances Wright, the 19th century woman's rights activist and utopian socialist long considered the historic avant-gardist who most greatly resembled those gentle bohemians of the 1910s.²⁶

Then McCarthyism's axe fell. This ardent anti-Communist with more than a decade's polemics to demonstrate his loyalties faced a battery of government officials more persuaded by testimony against his pre-1923 activities. Never officially naturalized (he had decided against filing because of his 1917 arrest and conviction as a conscientious objector), he seemed destined for deportation to Italy. Against this prospect he furiously gathered evidence. He also suffered a mild heart attack, premonition of a second stroke to follow. On Christmas Day, 1952, he received an announcement of an impending deportation order; the following month, the butchers' union released him, adding greatly to his stress. On September 15, 1953, working at his desk, he lapsed into a coma, and died the next day. Two days posthumously, a Certificate of Lawful Entry arrived along with a notice from a publisher of a proposed contract for yet another book he wanted to write, "Toward an Understanding of America."

A CENTRAL CATEGORY IN YOUNG LOUIS FRAINA'S OEUVRE AND A LARGE MISSING element in Crisis of the Middle Class helps explain the obscurity into which the book and the life behind it have fallen. The group of intellectuals who, at the end of Corey's life, set the pace for the changing framework of the era to come were not far from Corey's political inclinations. Mostly former Socialists and Communists, noted liberal figures like Daniel Bell, David Riesman, and Richard Hofstadter now paid homage to the "capitalist revolution" which presumably outmoded the old socialist anticipation of class warfare and protected the West against the ideological appeals of Communism. But these critics had, unlike Corey, a distaff and ironic view of American capitalism's cultural consequences; they were also by nature observers, not actors, upon the scene they viewed as if from a distance.²⁷

In the arguments of the time, the view of a dominant culture, of the inner human being and of psychological factors more powerful than economics or history, soon took over large spheres of discussion, putting aside once-familiar arguments about the equations of economics and class in particular. The heavily economic-minded Corey was, of course, the psychic descendent of the Louis Fraina who had delivered perceptive essays on "Socialism and Psychology" in 1913. The same Fraina had foreseen the rise of modernism, observed it closely in the behavior of ordinary jazz dancers, glimpsed the approach of changing gender roles and even the racial dynamics of a changing, more democratized society. A different and still radical Corey might have been perfectly placed to reflect upon the cultural experience of the century and fresh developments like Bebop, as counterparts to the rising civil rights movement.

Why did Crisis of the Middle Class, and Corey's general pronouncements afterward, fail so badly in these various regards? This was due not only to his political shifts, but also to an unreflective economism all too common to liberal and radical thought during the depressed 1930s and afterward. Attempts to break through that economism took place mainly in practice, such as the role of individual Marxists in theater, films, music and so forth. On the theoretical front, a tired Marxism continued and Modernists (like the Partisan Review crowd) who fled the political field simply turned economism on its head, into aestheticism.²⁸

But one could also find deeper reasons for his abandonment of the central racial questions about the nation's past and prospects, and the related questions of empire that Fraina analyzed so precociously. An age whose scholars paid little heed to W.E.B. DuBois's monumental Black Reconstruction (appearing the same year as Crisis of the Middle Class) offered precious little encouragement along these lines. Fraina would surely have done better, but existing Marxian orthodoxy offered little assistance. Perhaps the Beardian view of the frontier as the source of American democracy, offering a shift away from mechanical class theory, proved too strong for a counter critique. Or perhaps, as in Corey of the 1940s and early 1950s, the very notion of an American empire based on race values and economic-military power resonated with too many unwanted implications, past and future alike.²⁹

Most likely, and not so different from the various cultural issues, Corey had simply lost Fraina's confidence in the infinite subjectivity of the lower class subject. He had ceased to expect change from the bottom-up, even if he never ceased to hope that populations guided by sensitive leadership would find their way toward greater social participation. The ideologues of Communism and modern liberalism had agreed, after all, about the impossibility of direct democracy by the masses, in the old model of the Industrial Workers of the World or Daniel DeLeon. All this happened long before Corey had declared Marxism wrong-headed, and communism a disaster.

Crisis of the Middle Class and the life of its author deserve, nevertheless, to be re-evaluated in the light of what they tell us about the damage wrought by the century's disappointments. The missing and forgotten elements once so obvious to Fraina help predict the flare of rebellious political-cultural energy at the end of the 1960s. The suddenness with which this mass bohemian renaissance melted away again, leaving a trail of memories like the 1910s, recalled once more the significance of a utopia dreamed but unrealized. Lewis Corey, without a trace of environmental awareness, predicted in the final paragraph of his most popular book that "a world is dying," but offered the hope that another world might yet be born out of struggle. If no one would now call the Communist perspective the "New Enlightenment," as Corey mistakenly did, enlightenment of another kind still surely awaits the searcher. As Fraina might have remarked, the need is more urgent than ever.

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NOTES

1. Theodore Draper, Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking, 1957). Fraina-Corey reappears in many sections. return

2. Daniel DeLeon's Preamble to the I.W.W. (New York: New York Labor News, 1906), reprinted frequently afterward as by the S.L.P. as The Socialist Reconstruction of Society, offers the clearest expression of this view. Unfortunately, none of the biographical literature on DeLeon has been equal to the task of interpreting his intellectual influence across large sections of the Left. A Dreamer's Paradise Lost offers large suggestions. return

3. Regretfully, once more, no historical study has adequately captured the significance of the very important New Review. Modern Dance magazine has virtually vanished from examination, even to specialists in that field. My gratitude goes to Lee Baxandall for his studies of Fraina, before mine, and his attention to Modern Dance. return

4. For a recent study of this milieu, see Casey M. Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). return

5. Louis C. Fraina, "Literary Gleanings: The Chasm," Daily People, ( Apr. 9, 1911). return

6. I seek to reformulate this political situation in my volume, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the American Left (London: Verso Publishers, 1991 edition). return

7. While no adequate account yet exists of this situation in all its complexity, see relevant entries in the Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York: Garland Publishers, 1990), edited by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas. return

8. Lewis Corey, "How Is Income Distributed?" New Republic, XL (May 5, 1927), p.323. return

9. This point was made by Theodore Draper, Roots of American Communism, p.298. return

10. Louis Hacker, on flyleaf of Decline of American Capitalism (New York: Covici Friede, 1934); George Soule, "Why Capitalism Is Declining," New Republic, XXX (Sept.19, 1934), p.164. return

11. John R. Commons, "Communism and Collective Democracy," American Economic Review, XXV (June, 1935), p.215. return

12. Louis Hacker, "Addresses to the Middle Class," Nation, CXLI (Nov. 27, 1935), pp.625-26. Alan Angoff, "The Past, Present and Future of the Middle Class," Boston Evening Transcript, (Nov.30, 1935); John Chamberlain, "Books of the Times," New York Times, (Dec.11, 1935); "Corey Says Middle Class has Disappeared," New York Post, (Nov.11, 1935). return

13. See the intellectual assessment of Beard's work and influence in Howard Beale, ed., Charles Beard: An Appraisal (Louisville: University of Kentucky, 1954); and Bernard C. Borning, The Political and Social Thought of Charles A. Beard (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962). A standard comment on Parrington is contained in the survey, Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp.298-303. return

14. See for instance Warren Susman, "The Culture of the Thirties," in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp.150-83. return

15. William Blake, An American Looks at Karl Marx (New York: Cordon Company, 1939), p.677. return

16. Blake makes this point in ibid., p.205. return

17. C.L.R. James (in collaboration with Grace Lee and Raya Dunayevskaya), State Capitalism and World Revolution (Chicago: Kerr Company, 1986 edition from 1950 original), pp.34-35. See also my Introduction to this edition of State Capitalism and World Revolution, and the further parallels offered between Fraina/Corey and James in A Dreamer's Paradise Lost, Chapter 6. return

18. John Chamberlain, "Books of the Times." return

19. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989), and Loren Baritz, The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989). return

20. David Ramsey, "The Dilemma of the Middle Classes," New Masses, XV (Dec.1. 1935), pp.41-42. return

21. Nevertheless, Corey had contributed a thoughtful essay, "Minds of the Middle Classes," New Masses, XVI (Apr.7, 1936). Other contributors included Mike Gold, Granville Hicks, Joseph Freeman and Anna Rochester, but no independent intellectuals except Herbert Agar and union leader Pat Gorman. return

22. I am especially grateful for a 1982 interview with the late Charles S. Zimmerman, retired President of Local 22, for a glimpse of Corey's mentality at this point. I neglect here Corey's prominence as a writer and speaker for the "Lovestone" group of "Right Communists," expelled from the Communist Party in 1929 but resolute in their control of Local 22, and intellectually vibrant in their weekly newspaper, Worker's Age. For my account of Corey's writings for that paper, and the group's high estimation of his work, see A Dreamer's Paradise Lost, Ch. Six. return

23. Lewis Corey, "Marxism Reconsidered,III," Nation, CX (Mar.2, 1940), p.307. See Feb.17 and Feb.24 issues for the first two parts. return

24. Max Shachtman, "The Marxists Reply to Corey," ibid., (Mar.9, 1940), pp.331-32. return

25. See for instance the "official" history, Clifton Brock, The Americans for Democratic Action: Its Role in National Politics (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1962); and the best recent history, Steve Gillen, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947-1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). return

26. Corey's insistence, in his unpublished manuscript on Frances Wright, of the ignored importance of women's history remarkably foreshadowed by two decades the rise of the field in U.S. history. The unpublished manuscript, now outdated by several biographies of Wright, is in the Corey Papers, Columbia University. return

27. See, for instance, Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1950s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). return

28. Apart from Wald's admirable work, see for instance my remarks in C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (London, 1988), and such particular studies as Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg, Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz, Yip Harburg Lyricist (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1993). return

29. The mainstream historiography of much later decades, accepting the implications full-scale, viewed the settlement of the west as a racially-charged engagement subverting the prospects of democracy at large. But this kind of perspective, implicit though scarcely developed in DuBois, was impossible for even the most determinedly radical observers of the 1930s. See David Noble, The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989) for some interesting observations. See also Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams and the Challenge of Empire (New York: Routledge, 1995), for further reflections on radical historiography, race and empire. return

Contents of No. 17