17 Facts About Dwight Macdonald

Dwight Macdonald was an American writer, critic, philosopher, and activist.

Dwight Macdonald contributed to other New York publications including Time, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Politics, a journal which he founded in 1944.

Dwight Macdonald was educated at the Barnard School, Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale.

In 1929, Dwight Macdonald was employed at Time magazine; he had been offered a job by Henry Luce, a fellow Yale alumnus.

Dwight Macdonald resigned from the magazine in 1936 over an editorial dispute, when the magazine's executives severely edited the last installment of his extended four-part attack on US Steel.

Dwight Macdonald is the father of filmmaker and author Nicholas Macdonald and of Michael Macdonald.

Dwight Macdonald was an editor of the Partisan Review magazine from 1937 to 1943, but in the course of editorial disagreements about the degree, the practice, and the principles of political, cultural, and literary criticism, he quit to establish Politics, a magazine of more outspoken and leftist editorial perspective which he published from 1944 to 1949.

Dwight Macdonald was opposed to totalitarianism, including fascism and Bolshevism, whose defeat he viewed as necessary to the survival of civilization.

In 1955, Dwight Macdonald became the associate editor for one year of Encounter magazine, a publication sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was a CIA-funded front organisation meant to ideologically influence and control cultural elites in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Dwight Macdonald did not know that Encounter magazine was a CIA front, and when he learned the fact he condemned CIA sponsorship of literary publications and organizations.

Dwight Macdonald had participated in conferences sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Dwight Macdonald was not in the business of blaming people for enjoying what they enjoyed or admiring what they admired.

Previously, in the field of cultural studies Dwight Macdonald was placed among the radical traditions of the New York Intellectuals and of the Marxist Frankfurt School.

In opposing the Vietnam War, Dwight Macdonald defended the constitutional right of American university students to protest the public policies that facilitated that war in Southeast Asia, thus he supported the Columbia University students who organized a sit-in protest meant to halt the university's functions.

Yet as a political radical himself in 1968, Dwight Macdonald criticized the Students for a Democratic Society organization for insufficient ideological commitment, for showing only the red flag of revolution and not the black flag of anarchism, his political taste.

In further action upon his political principles, Dwight Macdonald signed his name to the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" by which he refused to pay income tax to undermine the financing of the undeclared Vietnam War.

Likewise, along with the American public intellectuals Mitchell Goodman, Henry Braun, Denise Levertov, Noam Chomsky, and William Sloane Coffin, Dwight Macdonald signed the antiwar manifesto "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" and was a member of RESIST, a non-profit organization for coordinating grass-roots political work.