Gary Best - Harold Laski and American Liberalism

First published 2005 by Transaction Publishers

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Best, Gary Dean.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0266-X (alk. paper)

1. Laski, Harold Joseph, 1893-1950. 2. Political scientistsGreat Britain Biography. 3. SocialistsGreat BritainBiography. 4. Liberalism United StatesHistory20th century. I. Title.

2004059862

ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0266-8 (hbk)

Looking at photographs of Harold Laski, it is difficult to imagine that this diminutive, frail, often sickly, man, with owlish eyes staring out through thick-lensed glasses, and the ever-present cigarette, could exert the influence that he did on both America and England for most of three decades. In fact, with his toothbrush mustache, Laski looked more like a combination of Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx than the eminence rouge of American liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s, and particularly of the New Deal. But Laski was, by most accounts, an intensely likable person, a combination of intellectual and entertainer, who managed for all of his fifty-seven years to play the role of a young prodigy. No one questioned his compassion for those in need of help, nor his commitment to a more just society in which few, if any, would need such help.

Much of Laskis success stemmed from his ability to befriend people in positions of influence whose friendship could be beneficial for him. But much of it also stemmed from an incredible work ethic, which found him driving his frail health to be tested in long hours of university and Labor Party service, even while he read and wrote prodigiously. His brilliance, natural friendliness, and iconoclasm endeared him to decades of students in both England and America, and his lecture tours of American campuses attracted packed auditoriums, much to the distress of those who were concerned about his influence on the younger generation. In the milieu of the 1930s, in particular, Laski offered answers when so many Americans had only questions. Supremely confident that he was the prophet of a new order that was sweeping the world, Laski did his best to ensure that it would arrive. Tirelessly he pronounced epitaphs on the old capitalistic order, only to see them delivered over an empty casket. By the time he died in 1950, his earlier pronouncements seemed silly, and the increased stridency and shrillness produced by his disappointment had begun to bore even many who had been devoted to him in earlier years. The real tragedy for Harold Laski was that he allowed his intellect to be captured and held captive by the Marxian dialectic, denying himself the use of his own reason despite that dialectics repeated failures.

Some of the research and writing for this book was done during the summer of 2000, as a result of the support of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green State University (Ohio). It was completed during a return visit to the Center in the summer of 2003. For their financial and intellectual support, I am greatly indebted to everyone at the Center, from the director, Fred Miller, Jr., through the deputy and associate directors, Ellen and Jeffrey Paul; the assistant director, Travis Cook; staff members Mary Dilsaver, Teresa Donovan, Tammi Sharp, and Terrie Weaver; and two outstanding research assistants, Mahesh Ananth and Nicolas Maloberti; as well as those who furnish financial support for the Center. I am also grateful to the Lilly Library at Indiana University for a Helm Fellowship that made possible my research in the Edward A. Rumely Papers there, and to the staffs of the Lilly Library, the Hoover Presidential Library, the Roosevelt Presidential Library, as well as to Danelle Moon of the Yale University Library, for their assistance in helping me to assemble the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle.

Gary Dean Best
Hilo, Hawaii

The lines above were peculiarly appropriate to Harold Laski, and yet, curiously enough, they were penned by Laski in The American Presidency to apply to an earlier British visitor to America, Lord Bryce. Ironically, it is difficult to imagine any observer of America more biased in his perception of America than Laski, himself. And yet, despite over two decades of criticism of America and Americans based on those biases, Laski was consumed by a love affair for this country and its people that marked only one of the many inconsistencies he harbored. It was a love affair that led him to immerse himself deeply in Americas politics and controversies, from his first years in this country, and to become, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. tells us, a more influential representative of Marxist thought in the United States in the 1930s than any American Marxist. It also caused the Republican Party in 1946 to tar the entire Democratic Party with the taint of Laskiism in the congressional elections of that year, and to win control of both houses for the first time since the onset of the Depression.

Laski admitted that many of the most formative influences in his life were American experiences and friendships. For one, he found his calling as a teacher in North America, first at McGill University in Canada, then at Harvard University. Aside from editorials that he wrote briefly for the London Daily Herald, his first real excusions into essay writing were for the American journals of liberal opinion, the Nation and the New Republic, and for American law journals. His first two books were published while he was at Harvard, and by an American publisher (Yale University Press), Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (1916) and Authority in the Modern State (1919), in which he formulated the political philosophy of pluralism that was to be associated with him during the 1920s.