Wednesday, November 27, 2002

In Memoriam

Sidney Hook is gone. Jay Lovestone is gone. And now Lewis Feuer is gone.

Lewis Feuer was a scholar and teacher who belonged to that generation of intellectuals that migrated from the communist left to the patriotic right – trying to undo in the second half of their lives the damage they did in the first half. Feuer, happily, came to his senses very early and lived very long – and his so his ratio of harm undone to harm done was one of the very highest of them all.

Perhaps you know his books: about Spinoza, about Einstein, about Marx, and about imperialism. Or perhaps you were taught by one of his graduate students: Feuer’s influence was personal even more than it was literary. Or perhaps you have felt his influence more indirectly – he was a valued participant in the larger project of the discrediting of communism, socialism, and the New Left.

Feuer was a child of the great immigration that arrived in the United States before the First World War. He succumbed to radicalism early: For him as for so many other young Jews born in the early years of this century, the far left promised emancipation not merely from poverty, but from the burdensome obligations of their ancient religion. Even then, however, Feuer had a saving bias in favor of liberty, and so he was drawn not to the Stalinist mainstream, but to the oddly free-spirited world of Trotskyist communism.

He was educated at City College, served in World War II, and began producing a series of massive books that makes the “Feuer, Lewis” entry at the Library of Congress a small monument to human industry. His wife, Kathryn, was simultaneously earning distinction as a scholar of Russian literature. Their joint success took them to Berkeley, where the eruption of student protest changed their lives.

As a young Trotskyist, he had perceived from the start the evils of the Soviet system; as a middle-aged scholar, he came to recognize that the Trotskyist alternative was itself a fantasy. Communism could not be saved from within.

Again like so many members of his generation, Feuer even at his most left-wing had somehow managed to combine political radicalism with cultural conservatism. He might have wanted to wage red revolution against the bourgeoisie – but never to have waged war on knowledge and learning. But of course that was exactly what the New Left of the 1960s did. In 1965, Feuer was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, the germ lab in which so many of the pathogens of the decade ahead were bred. He battled the student left – and then, when the university administration surrendered to them, he decided he had no conscientious choice but to leave.

Everybody knows about the migration of American antiwar radicals to Canada in the 1960s. But there was another migration too, less well-known. While New Leftists and protesters moved north to escape the draft, a cohort of conservative scholars and academics moved north at the same time to escape the sacking of the universities by the New Left. Allan Bloom took refuge at the University of Toronto from the machine-gun waving Black Panthers of Cornell. The young George Will came to Toronto too – and so did the Feuers. Lewis was hired to teach sociology; Kathryn became head of the university’s Slavic Studies Department.

In Toronto, they became close friends of my in-laws, Peter and Yvonne Worthington. Peter and Lewis were as different as any two men could possibly be. Peter was an adventurer, an athlete, a newspaperman from the days when newspapermen curled their lips at any of their fellows pretentious enough to call himself a “journalist.” Lewis admired Peter for his courage, audacity, and puckish defiance of Canadian conformity. Peter valued Lewis’s learning and long years of anticommunist struggle. When Peter started a newspaper of his own in 1971, the Toronto Sun, Lewis became in effect its academic stringer. Lewis in turn dedicated his one and only novel to Peter.

The northward migrants were not all happy in their new home. I remember once being taken out to lunch by one of them, a one-time protester now in his mid-50s, and very worried about the lack of economic opportunities in Canada for his children. One of his sons, by then a third-year university student, one day said to him, “Dad, you know all those stories you used to tell us about how you and your friends drove the corporate recruiters off campus for making bombs and napalm?” Yes, he said, he was afraid he did. “Do you think that if we told them it was OK to make bombs and napalm they might come back?”

It turned out that Canadian universties stayed calm in the 1960s not because Canadians were more sensible but simply because they were behind the times. The ugliness of the 1960s came to Canada in the 1970s. In a Toronto Sun column for December 1, Peter Worthington tells this story about Lewis:

“Lewis sought to quell student classroom outbursts by carrying a pressurized seltzer bottle in his briefcase. When guerrilla theatre erupted in his classes, he'd squirt the offender, which made others laugh and made it difficult for the protester to get indignant.

“When he and Kathryn left Toronto to teach at the University of Virginia in the late 1970s, I inherited his famous seltzer bottle.”

The Feuers stayed at the University of Virginia until retirement. Kathryn died in 1990. Lewis died on Sunday in Boston, age 89. They both lived long enough to see the collapse of communism – and to know that the work of the second half of their lives had not been in vain.

11/27 09:54 AM