This All-at-Onceness by Wittes Schlack Julie

Author:Wittes Schlack, Julie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2019-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

I was fifteen at a time when the pace of change was fantastically condensed, like the kind of time-lapse movies we were shown in science class. But instead of budding plants or rotating planets, I was seeing leaders and movements roar by, fragile and transient as twigs in a churning river. I went from flower child to anti-Imperialist to ambivalent Maoist a few years later, uncomfortable with the rhetoric, but convinced that I had to rectify what I then saw as my own willful naiveté about political power, how to get it, and how to use it.

Every now and then, Leonard Bernstein would briefly appear in my peripheral vision, giving speeches at anti-war marches and rallies for Eugene McCarthy. He flared back into the news in June of 1970, when up-and-coming essayist and exemplar of The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe, wrote a lengthy article in New York magazine. “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” which documented a fundraiser that Leonard’s wife, Felicia, had organized and held in their penthouse apartment for the Black Panther 21s’ Legal Defense Fund.23

Wolfe’s snarky phrase, “radical chic,” has since become a permanent part of the American vocabulary, at least among the intelligentsia. It’s the identical twin to “political correctness,” a weirdly superior sort of insult that’s hurled from the left rather than the right. It bugs me, so tonight, after watching the Our World clip of Bernstein and Van Cliburn, I seek out that Tom Wolfe article from 1970. Midway through the first page, I’m already sickened by its venom, its smugness, its pandering to racial stereotypes under the guise of skewering white privilege. I find it appalling.

Lenny was not new to progressive causes, I argue with the page. In the years preceding World War II and in its immediate aftermath, when fighting Fascism was as American as a Thank you for your Service bumper sticker is today, there were unlimited opportunities to take a well-intentioned stand. With his dollars and with his words, Bernstein had supported numerous anti-Fascist organizations, raised funds for victims of Stalingrad, begun work on an opera about Sacco and Vanzetti. Composing, conducting, and jetting around the world, he was more of a signer and endorser than a leader. But his actions were not without consequences. In 1950, he was blacklisted by CBS, suddenly unable to continue the radio and television broadcasts that had fueled his career. Harry Truman banned his music (along with that of Gershwin, Copland, and other progressive American composers) from State Department premises and functions overseas.

In 1953, Eisenhower’s State Department revoked his passport on the grounds that Bernstein was a security risk, preventing him from conducting overseas at a time when the blacklist was making it increasingly difficult for him to perform at home. To regain his passport, Bernstein wrote and signed a self-excoriating affidavit that, while not naming names, essentially disowned his own leftist activities in the 1940s. He was not a Communist, he swore, and had only ever voted for Democrats or Republicans. His association

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