New York, New York, Stati Uniti
The Europe-America Groups (EAG) was a 1948-49 organizational attempt by the New York Intellectuals to create solidarity between US and European independent leftists dissatisfied with polarizing postwar politics and to inaugurate a “new force on the democratic left.” Conceived by US journalist and editor Dwight Macdonald, Italian intellectual and antifascist refugee Nicola Chiaromonte, and US writer Mary McCarthy, the EAG can be understood as a third-camp political initiative that rejected both Soviet-style communism and US liberal capitalism.
Supported by Macdonald’s magazine politics and guided by McCarthy, the organization aimed to foster ties with noncommunist leftwing intellectuals in Western Europe and to leverage the French and Italian connections of Chiaromonte—who served as the organization’s primary envoy and approached Albert Camus, Alfred Rosmer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Aldo Captini, Riccardo Bauer, and Ferdinando Tartaglia, among others, to discuss potential collaborations. In the US, the EAG was advertised in The New York Times, The Nation, Partisan Review, and politics; it’s manifesto also appeared in the French syndicalist magazine Révolution Prolétarienne. The New York cohort included William Barrett, Lamberto Borghi, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sidney Hook, Alfred Kazin, Paolo Milano, Nicolas Nabakov, William Philips, Philip Rhav, Isaac Rosenfeld, Gaetano Salevemini, John Knox Jessup, Delmore Schwartz, Saul Steinberg, Dorothy Thompson, Niccolò Tucci, and Bertram Wolfe, among others.
Though Chiaromonte reported that his European contacts shared the EAG’s desire for new political alternatives on the left and were interested in the development of a likeminded transatlantic network, the organization was destabilized by diverging positions on Stalinism: a McCarthy-Macdonald-Chiaromonte faction envisioned the EAG as a transnational forum for information and idea exchange that would foster a new internationalism; a Hook-Rhav-Philips faction wanted more direct opposition to Stalinism. This tension produced delays and ambivalence over the organization’s aims that undermined its ability to collaborate with European connections.
Despite its short life, the EAG organized public talks in New York on cultural freedom and allocated humanitarian aid to intellectuals in France and Italy. It moreover helped establish a transatlantic network of democratic leftists that was soon mobilized by the Friends of Russian Freedom, Americans for Intellectual Freedom, and Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Vettori collegati
Nicola Chiaromonte
Autore e attivista
Tempo Presente
Rivista
Congress for Cultural Freedom
Organizzazione culturale
Paolo Milano
Critico letterario
Alfred Kazin
Scrittore e critico letterario americano
Fonti
Hugh Wilford, “An Oasis: The New York Intellectuals in the Late 1940s,” Journal of American Studies 28.2 (August 1994): 209-223
Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester, 1995).
Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York, 1994).
Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Political Economy of American Hegemony 1945-1955 (New York, 2001).
Gregory Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle (Ithaca, 1996).
Mary McCarthy Papers, Vassar College Libraries, Vassar College.
Dwight Macdonald Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Nicola Chiaromonte Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University