Of G-Men and Eggheads by Rodden John;

Author:Rodden, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2017-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Irving Howe in his office at Stanford University, 1962.

Courtesy: Nina Howe

CHAPTER FOUR

WANTED BY THE FBI?

IRVING HORENSTEIN, #7384A AKA “REVOLUTIONARY CONSPIRATOR” IRVING HOWE

TAILING A “TROTSKYITE”

The file on Irving Howe (né Horenstein) compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) discloses that its agents followed his activities closely for more than eight years. It searched his records extensively, interviewed neighbors and colleagues to uncover information about his activities, and pursued him as a national security risk long after he had resigned from the Independent Socialist League (ISL), a tiny, New York–based Trotskyist sect.1 The file contains 148 pages, 15 of them partially or wholly blacked out. It runs from February 27, 1951, to April 14, 1959, and covers reports from regional FBI bureaus in New York City, Albany, Newark, St. Louis, Miami, Boston, and Detroit.2

Most of these reports address Howe’s activities in the ISL and his membership in Trotskyist organizations in the 1940s and 1950s. Much of the file covers Howe’s statements in public lectures about the Soviet Union and regarding the changing nature of Stalinism during the 1950s. One glaring feature of the file is conspicuous by its absence, though it is perhaps by now unsurprising. As with Lionel Trilling and Dwight Macdonald, the fact that no agent ever seems to have read any of Howe’s work to ascertain his political positions speaks volumes about the one-size-fits-all information-gathering procedures of the American intelligence services during the Cold War. The sole exception is the joint resignation letter that he and Stanley Plastrik submitted to the ISL in 1952, a copy of which was obtained by a Bureau informant.

For historians and scholars, one irony in Howe’s dossier that he would doubtless have appreciated is that FBI agents (however unaware of the irony) repeatedly call him, using the same invidious language as did his Cold War–era Stalinist opponents, a Trotskyite, a term that also occasionally surfaces (along with Trotzkyite) in Macdonald’s dossier. The Feds used the labels Trotskyist and Trotskyite interchangeably. Communist Party sympathizers knew better. They wielded the latter characterization as a cudgel. But the G-men failed to recognize any distinction between the two words.

The highlight of the FBI file on Howe (a name that the Bureau persisted in treating as his “alias” although Howe had legally changed it in 1948) is the hour-long interview that two agents sprung on him in August 1954.3 When they approached him as he entered his car on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the agents were impressed by his “friendly and cordial manner,” though they later urged that a Security Index file be opened on him for long-term surveillance. Although Howe was never again confronted directly, the FBI kept watch on him for five more years. Reports continued to be placed in his file on his lectures to university audiences and to political clubs and even on his “luggage lost in France” during a trip to Europe in 1957.4

Howe’s FBI file also furnishes a valuable biographical background for his repeated castigation of McCarthyism in the 1950s: it shows that Howe himself was being “tailed.

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