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KENT WORCESTER is a member of the New Politics editorial board.
WHEN JAMES BURNHAM ARRIVED in New York City, in August, 1929, he had little interest in political issues of any kind. As an undergraduate at Princeton in the mid-'20s he had taken courses in literature, art, and philosophy. Described by one dean as "without any question the finest brain I have encountered in all my years," Burnham then enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Anglo-Saxon under J.R.R. Tolkein, as well as medieval and modern philosophy. He moved to New York at the ripe age of 23 to teach philosophy at New York University, which was at that time a modest operation on the eastern fringe of Washington Square Park. His salary, as an instructor, was an even more modest $2,300/year.
The stock market crash of 1929, and the economic depression that followed, propelled Burnham, along with other intellectuals of his generation, to the left. While Burnham continued to teach traditional humanistic topics, such as aesthetics and ethics, he migrated steadily leftward in the first half of the 1930s. In this new biography, Daniel Kelly reports that the "first public sign that Burnham was warming to Marxism" was his 1932 review of Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. During that summer he "pored over the writings of Marx and Engels ... hoping to understand better the world economic crisis." A key influence on his deepening radicalization was his NYU colleague Sidney Hook, whose nuanced reading of key Marxist texts helped reconcile Burnham's underlying pragmatism and empiricism with Marxism's emphasis on deep-rooted historical change. For a time Burnham considered joining the Communist Party, and he even met with Earl Browder to discuss the party's program, but Hook managed to convince him that the party was "insufficiently Marxist both in its slogans and in its practices." As an alternative, in late 1933 they both joined the American Workers Party, which had been founded by the independent-minded labor organizer, A.J. Muste.
Burnham threw himself into the project of building the AWP. He spoke at its meetings, contributed to its fund drives, and wrote a column for the party newspaper entitled "Their Government," which derided FDR's New Deal as a capitalist plot. With Hook he helped...