If Eleanor Roosevelt was the self-appointed godmother of post-New Deal liberalism, then Freda Kirchwey was its unelected recording (and traveling) secretary. Each woman understood her role and memorized her lines before assuming her part in her long and stormy run on the political stage.
In preparation for her grand entrance each woman took a good hard look at the man’s world that was liberal politics, elbowed her way into those smoke-filled rooms, and proceeded to make her presence known—and indispensable—as a political woman. Not content to organize a ladies auxiliary of American liberalism, each realized that her success depended upon her ability—and willingness—to perform womanly, if not necessarily wifely, tasks.
Mrs. FDR may never have wielded a magic wand, but she was indefatigable in her efforts to keep her worshipers on the (seldom) straight and (never) narrow path of (her definition) New Deal orthodoxy. Mrs. Evans Clark (née Freda Kirchwey) may never have been trained to keep a boss cool and the coffee hot, but she certainly knew how to generate a paper flow and an office hum.
From 1918 when a 2 5-year-old Kirchwey arrived at The Nation to clip international stories, to 1937 when she bought the journal from Oswald Garrison Villard, to 1955 when she sold her interest to Carey McWilliams, Mrs. Clark had an almost uninterrupted reign as the woman emergent, the woman triumphant, and the woman embattled of The Nation. Only during a difficult Florida interiude in the early 1930’s, when she tried and failed to nurse her tubercular third son back to health, was she not the woman ever-present at The Nation.
Sara Alpern’s interest in Freda Kirchwey initially derived not from her singular career as a liberal journalist, but from her triangular life as a wife, mother, and professional woman. How Kirchwey balanced the conflicting demands of her three worlds was the question that drew an awed Alpern to her subject. How Kirchwey negotiated her way among the assorted agendas of her allies on the left was the question that sustained Alpern’s project long after the Clark-Kirchwey household ceased to be either inspiring or effective. One Mrs. Evans Clark, unfaithful wife (to an unfaithful husband) and uninterested parent (to her undisciplined remaining child), was simply Ms. Freda Kirchwey, modern woman gone amuck. And not worth a full biography.
But Freda Kirchwey, keeper of the flame of liberal antifascism (and douser of the flickering fire of liberal anti-Communism) is another matter. Here a thorough biography may well be in order, if only because of the extensive influence that her Nation used to wield. After all, the damage done to Michael Clark was presumably limited to him. He might blame his upbringing (or lack thereof) on a mother who lacked “maternal fiber.” But who are the liberals to hold responsible for their failure to face the evil of Communism in the postwar world?
And if such a question is too distasteful or unfamiliar to them, they could point their collective finger at one Freda Kirchwey. After all, she had long employed her feminine charms toward effecting a permanent union between the wartime odd couple that was the United States and the Soviet Union. Having failed at that venture in matchmaking, she then tried to play midwife at any number of (what she hoped would be non-) aborted moments of postwar collaboration. And, having witnessed innumerable stillbirths, she set out to mother a generation of Americans unable to wean themselves from the pap of Mother Russia.
Sara Alpern, however, is not prepared to point a critical finger at either Mrs. Clark or Ms. Kirchwey. Failure on either the homefront or the Popular Front was apparently not Freda’s fault. “Freda and her peers were twentieth century feminists,” who, unlike their 19th-century counterparts, “insisted that career and marriage could be combined.” After all, who could blame Freda and Evans for thinking they could “raise children without giving up any of their very busy lives,” especially when experts were insisting that “childrearing was the province of child development professionals.” When it all came crashing down around her there was always psychoanalysis to enter into and The Nation to retreat to.
Alpern may occasionally cringe at Kirchwey’s shortcomings as a wife, mother, and liberal publicist, but her winces never get beyond an “oh well” shrug, as in “conducting herself as a whole person in office, home and bed was much harder than she (Clark-Kirchwey) had realized.” Having early on conceded that she hoped to find in Kirchwey a successful modern woman, Alpern apparently could not bring herself to declare Kirchwey’s search for private happiness and public influence a personal failure.
During the 1920’s and 1930’s, Mrs. Clark went on her own search for answers to her “perennial question of women and careers.” Never satisfied with her discoveries, Kirchwey simply abandoned her public pursuit of women’s issues and instead turned her considerable energy to “journalistic goals that could be achieved.”
And just what were those goals? In reality, there was but one—with a single, if crucial, variation: to make the world free from fascism—and to deny that Communism could ever be a virulent, if carefully disguised, form of fascism. In her fight for feminist independence, a young Mrs. Clark, heady with the aroma of a “modern woman,” set out to have it all without looking back. In her fight against fascism in Spain, a middle-aged Ms. Kirchwey, certain that she was on to the scent of her enemies, set herself on a course from which she never turned back. In Freda Kirchwey’s world there were only two kinds of political animals: fascists in league with their imperialist fellow travelers and antifascists of all persuasions. Between 1936 and the onset of the Spanish Civil War and 1955 when she left The Nation (mercifully on the eve of Khrushchev’s revelations) Kirchwey was the personification of the liberals’ dictum that there should be no enemies to the left.
As Alpern would have it, Kirchwey saw her role as the ultimate mother hen. Rather than remove the bad eggs or lock out any wayward chickens, she would draw her brood to her comfortably fashionable antifascist hen house. And the Soviet Union, “despite many imperfections,” remained to Kirchwey an antifascist state long after the battle against its Hitlerian brand had ended.
What of those liberals who did not share her principle of nonexclusion? They simply chose to exclude themselves. Louis Fischer “noisily resigned” in June of 1945 over The Nation‘s editorial contention that Poland had to be sacrificed to allied unity. Reinhold Niebuhr and Robert Bendiner subsequently left The Nation to found the liberal anti-Communist Americans for Democratic Action.
Kirchwey officially (and officiously) refused to take sides between the ADA and the Wallaceite Progressive Citizens of America. Instead she contented herself with deploring the division within liberalism. But her own unwillingness to see the Soviet Union for what it was—and is—helped to make the split unavoidable. To her credit, Kirchwey did not support the “foolish” Wallace candidacy in 1948, because it had both too much Communist and too little labor support. That singular exception aside, she followed the frayed Popular Front line—even to the point of blaming the United States for contributing to the Czech coup of 1948 by its refusal to lend money to the Masaryk government.
To her credit, Alpern has remembered what Kirchwey had conveniently forgotten: namely, that the Soviets had “dissuaded” the Czechs from accepting Marshall Plan money. Alpern also reminds her readers that Kirchwey could be guilty of the “sin” that George Orwell attributed to “nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards”: namely, the desire to be “anti-fascist without being anti-totalitarian.” But, just as Kirchwey stopped well short of any fundamental criticism of the “workers’ paradise,” so does Alpern excuse Kirchwey of any motive worse than excessive goodwill.
To their credit, not all liberals shared Kirchwey’s politics. For what now appears to be a steadily shrinking historical moment between 1945 and, say, 1965, the phrase “liberal anti-Communism” was, for other than Kirchwey liberals, not an oxymoron. From the perspective of the late 1980’s, however, it has become all too apparent that the Kirchwey approach to international affairs has once again cast its spell over the liberal mind. Thirty years ago this “madame secretary” might have thought that she had lost her brood and her battle. Not so today.
[Freda Kirchwey: A Woman of The Nation, by Sara Alpern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) $29.95]
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