American Maggie

The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism

by Michael Kimmage

Harvard University Press, 2009

Michael Kimmage, Assistant Professor of History at the Catholic University of America, has produced a detailed intellectual history that also serves to invoke some of today’s most pressing issues. The Conservative Turn explores the rightward political evolutions of Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers, and their influence upon the post-war political ideologies on both the Left and Right.  Kimmage’s central argument is that the rightward turn which characterized the passionate, religious anti-communist conservatism of Chambers, as well as the moderate, introspective anti-communist liberalism of Trilling respectively sowed the seeds for post-War liberalism and conservatism.  Through exploring the trajectories of Trilling and Chambers—their bourgeois upbringings, Ivy League radicalism, post-college communist activity, and subsequent “conservative turns” characterized by rejecting communism—Kimmage shows how those ideologies germinated and developed. 

The book proceeds through Kimmage’s seamless and confident interweaving of the two narratives.   Trilling, born to Eastern-European Jewish parents, was an urbane, irreligious intellectual attracted to the honesty and depth of Communist culture.  However, once he recognized the homogeneity and group-think sowed by Communist ideology, he discerned an inherent incompatibility between Marxist beliefs and liberalism, and became an anti-Communist.  Through his book reviews in Partisan Review, lectures as a Columbia professor, and primary literary accomplishment, The Middle of the Journey, Trilling came to espouse a brand of liberalism that championed critical questioning and analysis, and viewed Communism as antithetical to those values. 

Simultaneously, Chambers was born into a dysfunctional Episcopalian family.  In college, his youthful conservatism gave way to radical communism, leading to prolific writing of socialist literature and culminating in his position as a “paid functionary”—or spy—for the Soviet Union; his espionage eventually put him in contact with a top-secret Washington communist ring that he claimed infiltrated the highest levels of government and included Alger Hiss, a rising star in the State Department.  Yet after watching another American spy for the Soviet Union disappear in Russia for making anti-communist statements, Chambers did an abrupt about-face and abandoned the “evil” Soviet cause, returning to his Christian roots and morphing into a passionate anti-communist religious conservative.  The extent of Chambers’s activities as a spy remains ambiguous, but his involvement was sufficient to instill within him long-lasting paranoia and fear for his life.  Eventually becoming a Quaker, Chambers viewed a simple, Christian agrarian society as the highest manifestation of American ideals.  His distinction as possibly the staunchest anti-Communist in the American intellectual elite was solidified with his turn as a witness against Alger Hiss in his 1948 trial, which served as the catalyst for Chambers’s landmark conservative treatise, Witness.

In presenting their intellectual paths, Kimmage rarely forces discordant parallels between these men.  In closely tracing their ideological journeys, however, Kimmage sacrifices useful biographical details. While the book is an intellectual history and not a joint biography, it would have been well served to focus on additional facets of Trilling’s and Chambers’s lives.  Diana Trilling, herself an intellectual powerhouse, appears sparsely, and there is no description of her response to, or influence on, Lionel’s ideological transformation.  Esther Chambers, Whittaker’s Jewish wife, represents a missed opportunity for exploration of how non-Christian Americans and “others” fit into Chambers’s Christian-agrarian ideal. Other interesting biographical events are mentioned briefly and never revisited, such as Chambers’s brother’s suicide which “completed Chambers’s journey” towards communism, or Chambers’s secret homosexual activities.  Even more conspicuous is the lack of detail about Chambers’s life as a member of the communist underground.  The fervent and extreme nature which propelled his treasonous activities undoubtedly informed his political philosophy as well, and thereby warrants increased chronicling. 

The Conservative Turn’s merit as a scholarly analysis on the common yet divergent ancestry of post-war liberalism and conservatism notwithstanding, the book’s lingering power stems from the resonance that it holds today.  The United States is currently faced with a foreign enemy as belligerent and insidious as that posed by communist regimes: Iran. While there has been no endorsement of the Iranian nuclear ambition among the intellectual elite as there had been with communism, the range of responses to the Iranian threat have fallen along fault lines dug into the political landscape decades ago by Trilling and Chambers. Trilling’s liberal opposition to communism was born out of his distaste for censorship and uniformity of thought, and was fundamentally a battle over ideas fought on the most esoteric level through book reviews, essays and articles; the political leader he considered as sharing his values was President Kennedy, who invited him to the White House to discuss art and literature.  Liberals today have taken up his banner of moderation, with the current administration championing dialogue and diplomacy as the best means of curbing the Iranian threat. Yet this course has proven futile and even damaging, especially amidst new reports that while stringing Washington along, Iran has been constructing a second enrichment facility used to make bomb-grade uranium.  Given the ineffectiveness of the Trilling-inspired diplomatic course, the U.S. should take a lesson from Chambers, “the archetypical American neoconservative,” who approached the looming communist threat as a literal enemy; he claimed of his testimony against Hiss, “I regarded my action in going to the Government as a simple act of war, like the shooting of an armed enemy in combat.”

He considered his editorial pulpit at Time as a bullhorn to rally the masses to fight communism, and his ideology was embodied by the assertive, forceful foreign policies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; it is incarnated today by those conservatives that advocate aggressively combating the Iranian regime through all necessary means, rather than continuing to be drawn into a lengthy and pointless diplomatic dance by an adversary that needs only to buy time for success. In the grave and dangerous world we now face, it is instead the passionate, fierce, and uncompromising message of Chambers which seems most apt to meeting the primary threat of our time.

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Dana Stern Gibber works for a foreign policy think tank in New York.

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