Dictionary of Literary Influences

Ludendorff, Erich

morality. Luce often quoted Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses in the 1930s, and, in emphasizing the difficult choices facing civilization during World War II, his favorite quotations were from Alfred North Whitehead. Later he repeatedly quoted Walt Whitman. Luce read Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Max Weber, and the Christian Socialists, but he revered the American founding fathers above all political thinkers and heralded Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers as containing universal political truths. In the mid-1960s Luce yearned for a new U.S. policy toward China and often countered Rudyard Kipling’s dictum that “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” with hopes of cooperation and communication between the United States and China. Walter Lippman’s writing on the state of journalism greatly influenced Luce and the cofounder of Time Magazine, Briton Hadden. Lippman asserted that journalism needed to be more analytical. Luce and Hadden showed Lippman their prototype of Time and often quoted him extensively when describing the magazine’s mission.

Archives

Time Inc. Archives, Time-Life Building, New York, New York. Interoffice memoranda, Luce letters and speeches, business documents and historical data. Restricted access.

McCormick Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. Luce letters between Henry and family and between Henry and family benefactor Nettie Fowler McCormick.

Printed Sources

Baughman, James. Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987). Luce biography containing the most references to Luce’s reading practices.

Herzstein, Robert. Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).

Kobler, John. Luce: His Time, Life and Fortune (New York: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1968). Contains several references to childhood reading practices, without citations.

Luce, Henry. The Ideas of Henry Luce, John Jessup (ed.), (New York: Atheneum, 1969). A collection of Luce’s speeches, put into historical and biographical context by Jessup.

Swanberg, W. A. Luce and His Empire (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). Contains numerous reprints of Luce family correspondence.

Richard N. Swanson

LUDENDORFF, ERICH (1865–1937)

Erich Ludendorff was born in a small town outside of Posen in eastern Prussia to a poor but socially prominent family. Ludendorff began his education in the local school before deciding on a military career. He attended Cadet School in Plön in 1877 and concluded the training at Berlin-Lichterfelde in 1880. Ludendorff continued his education at the War Academy in Berlin between 1893 and 1897 before beginning his meteoric rise in the General Staff. Ludendorff was known as an excellent student but a poor athlete. He became quartermaster general during the First World War and shared responsibility for the overall war effort with Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg between 1916 and 1918. Whereas Hindenburg survived the war as a sympathetic figure, Ludendorff was shattered by the collapse

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in 1918 and became radicalized by the experience. Ludendorff believed he was made the scapegoat for the military defeat and the ensuing revolution. After returning from exile in Scandinavia, Ludendorff began what can be called his second career as a right-wing revolutionary and völkisch ideologue. Ludendorff distinguished himself as an early supporter of the Nazi Party and a prolific author of racist literature throughout the Weimar period.

Like Hindenburg, Ludendorff revealed no real discernible intellectual interest outside of military affairs during his career. Ludendorff lived a Spartan life with his wife, Margarethe. After the war, however, the intellectual influences on Ludendorff can only be described as poisonous. Ludendorff was perennially involved in putschist conspiracies against the Weimar Republic. These plots endangered his wife, whom Ludendorff began to view as a hindrance to his political battles. Ludendorff lived in Munich, the hot bed of völkisch radicalism in the 1920’s, where he was revered by younger personalities such as Adolf Hitler and Freikorps commander Hermann Ehrhardt. The person who influenced Ludendorff the most during the postwar years was a widow living in the town next to him. Mathilde Kemnitz studied medicine at the University of Freiburg where she became interested in genetics. A devout racist, Kemnitz believed strongly in the tenets of eugenics and gravitated naturally to the National Socialist Party. Kemnitz introduced Ludendorff to the racial ideas of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose Foundations of the Twentieth Century (1899) delineated the differences between the races. Chamberlain’s pseudoscience lauded the Aryan race and confirmed that Jews were the most dangerous race. For an embittered man who looked for scapegoats while believing himself to be one, Kemnitz’s anti-Semitism made sense to Ludendorff. In 1926 Ludendorff divorced his wife at the age of sixty-one and married Kemnitz. They lived in her house and together published dozens of anti-Semitic pamphlets. Ludendorff and his guru Kemnitz feared international forces, specifically the unholy trinity of Jews, Freemasons, and the Catholic Church. Ludendorff, who more than likely was mentally ill by the late 1920’s, began to attack former allies for their supposed links to one or more of the trinity. Ludendorff accused the veterans’ group Stahlhelm of harboring Freemasons and Hitler of joining forces with “Rome.”

Archives

Nachlass Erich Ludendorff (N 77) Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, Germany. Contains an index of Ludendorff’s racist and political writings, along with some original copies. Unfortunately, Ludendorff’s personal papers remain in control of the family and can only be accessed with written permission. Ludendorff’s official correspondence is found in several record groups in Freiburg.

Printed Sources

Goodspeed, D. J. Ludendorff: Soldier, Dictator, Revolutionary (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1966).

Parkinson, Roger. Tormented Warrior: Ludendorff and the Supreme Command (New York: Stein and Day, 1978).

Tschuppik, Karl. The Tragedy of a Military Mind, W. H. Johnson (trans.), (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1932).

Brian Crim

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Lukács, György

LUKÁCS, GYÖRGY (1885–1971)

György, or Georg, Lukács, the son of a self-made Jewish financier in Budapest, Hungary, was a melancholy boy, barely communicating with his mother or brother and only superficially with his father and sister. He always felt alienated from his family’s bourgeois society and resisted their conventional philistinism. They preached success in business, did not support his intellectual aspirations, and generally did not take him seriously. He made no friends but escaped by reading the literature of Europe and America. At the age of nine he adored Hungarian prose translations of Homer’s Iliad and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and soon thereafter Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. As a teenager he read Berthold Auerbach, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Gerhart Hauptmann, Friedrich Hebbel, Henrik Ibsen, John Keats, Gottfried Keller, Max Nordau, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Johann Friedrich von Schiller, Algernon Swinburne, Paul Verlaine, and Émile Zola. He met his first true friend, Marcell Benedek, son of Elek Benedek, at 15.

Lukács attended the Protestant Gymnasium in Budapest, then the University of Budapest, receiving degrees in political science in 1906 and philosophy in 1909. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Lukács became familiar with the works of Jakob Burckhardt, Wilhelm Dilthey, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, József Eötvös, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Immanuel Kant, Alfred Kerr, Søren Kierkegaard, Imre Madách, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, Baruch Spinoza, Max Stirner, Alexis de Tocqueville, Lev Tolstoy, and Ferdinand Tönnies. In Berlin and Heidelberg before World War I, he met Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Paul Ernst, Emil Lask, Emil Lederer, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, and became attracted to the neoKantianism of Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband. Impressed by the plays of Sándor Bródy and the politics of Rosa Luxemburg, he later transposed his appreciation of the realism of Shakespeare, Honoré de Balzac, and Stendhal into defenses of the realism of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Anna Seghers.

In 1917 Lukács rejected all his work to date and deposited a large cache of manuscripts, correspondence, notes, and his 1910–11 diary in a vault at the Deutsche Bank in Heidelberg. These papers, recovered in 1973, are the richest source of information about his early intellectual life. From just after World War I until his death, the two greatest influences on Lukács were Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. His major work consisted in re-Hegelianizing Marx to develop a specifically Hegelian version of Western Marxism that he called “Critical Realism,” but scholars such as George L. Kline have noticed the strong influence of Friedrich Engels in Lukács’s Marxism and significant deviations from Hegel in Lukács’s Hegelianism. In 1971 Lukács told The New Left Review, “there are only three truly great thinkers in the West, incomparable with all others: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx.”

Archives

Lukács Archives, Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Printed Sources

Arato, Andrew, and Paul Breines. The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism (London: Seabury, 1978).

Congdon, Lee. The Young Lukács (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

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Feenberg, Andrew. Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Gluck, Mary. Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Joós, Ernest (ed.). George Lukács and His World: A Reassessment (New York: Peter Lang, 1988).

Kadarkay, Arpad. Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991).

Löwy, Michael. L’évolution politique de Lukacs, 1909–1929: Contribution à une sociologie de l’intelligentsia révolutionnaire (Lille: Atelier Reproduction des Thèses, Université Lille III; Paris: Champion, 1975).

Lukács, György. Georg Lukács: Selected Correspondence, 1902–1920: Dialogues with Weber, Simmel, Buber, Mannheim, and Others (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

———. Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (London: Verso, 1983).

Marcus, Judith, and Zoltan Tar (eds.). Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989).

Eric v.d. Luft

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M

MACARTHUR, DOUGLAS (1880–1964)

Douglas MacArthur was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the third son of Arthur MacArthur, a well-connected high-ranking United States career soldier of Scottish descent, and his wife, Mary Pinkney Hardy of Norfolk, Virginia. Educated initially at grade schools in frontier army posts and Washington, in 1897 MacArthur graduated first in his class from a newly founded Episcopalian private school, West Texas Military Academy near Fort Sam Houston, which combined military discipline, compulsory chapel, and high academic standards. Following family tradition, in 1899 MacArthur entered West Point Military Academy, graduating as first captain and excelling academically, though due to lack of interest his subsequent performance in Army Engineering School was mediocre. During World War I he fought flamboyantly with the 42nd Division in France, winning promotion to brigadier general. From 1919 to 1922 as superintendent of West Point, MacArthur introduced reforms to broaden the curriculum and modernize army training. He later claimed that Philippine assignments during the 1920s gave him special insight into “Oriental psychology.”

Appointed army chief of staff in 1930, for six years from 1935 MacArthur, who retired from the United States army two years later, was military adviser to the newly independent Philippine Commonwealth Government. In 1941 the War Department recalled MacArthur to active duty to command United States Far Eastern army forces while exercising similar authority over the Filipino troops. When Japanese forces overran the islands in 1942, MacArthur escaped to Australia and was appointed commander of the Southwest Pacific Area Theater. Although the American navy was primarily responsible for victory in the Pacific campaign, MacArthur’s forces provided important support. As supreme commander of the Allied occupation forces in Japan from 1945 to 1950, MacArthur authorized extensive political, economic, and military reforms. As the cold war intensified he demanded a major American anti-Communist initiative in Asia. When North

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Korea invaded the South in June 1950, quickly overrunning most of the country, MacArthur was appointed commander of the United Nations forces that intervened in Korea. In September 1950 he devised the risky Inchon landing operation that turned the tide in Korea. MacArthur’s subsequent insistence on crossing the former Thirty-Eighth Parallel dividing North and South Korea and attempting to reunite the country led Chinese Communist “volunteer” forces to enter the war, initially precipitating a near-rout of the United Nations forces, though the situation eventually stabilized somewhere near the parallel. After MacArthur demanded the use of nuclear weapons against China, in April 1951 President Harry S. Truman dismissed him for insubordination. Returning to the United States, MacArthur was welcomed as a national hero but nonetheless failed to win the coveted 1952 Republican presidential nomination. MacArthur subsequently lived in relative seclusion in New York City, writing his memoirs. His self-serving ambition, egotism, and self-promotion and his indifference to constitutional restraints undoubtedly vitiated his indisputably outstanding military abilities. MacArthur’s career embodied many of the overall strengths and weaknesses of broader twenti- eth-century American policies toward Asia.

MacArthur’s high-school education included Latin and Greek classics and most of the then-accepted canon of English literature, history, and poetry. Determined to be a scholar-soldier, MacArthur’s ambitious father, his son’s greatest role model, always read avidly, and in the 1880s he submitted a report urging United States expansion into the Asia-Pacific area. A nine-month Asian tour with his parents in 1905–6 likewise permanently convinced the son of the significance of Asia, which he perceived as Western civilization’s last frontier, imbibing Social Darwinist views on Anglo-Saxons’ superiority to Asians. The adult MacArthur read voraciously, often consuming three volumes a day, and acquired a library of seven to eight thousand volumes, many inherited from his father. Military history, especially the Civil War and biographies of Confederate generals, was a particular interest, but he also followed international affairs closely, habitually perusing numerous newspapers and periodicals. While largely reflecting MacArthur’s existing preoccupations, his choice of reading matter perhaps encouraged his grandiloquent tendency to glorify himself and inflate events in which he participated.

Archives

Douglas MacArthur Memorial, Norfolk, Va.: repository for MacArthur’s personal papers. National Archives II, College Park, Md.: repository of Department of State and Modern

Military Records relating to MacArthur’s official career.

Printed Sources

James, D. Clayton. The Years of MacArthur, 3 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970–85). Most significant biographical work.

MacArthur, Douglas. Reminiscences (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).

Manchester, William. American Caesar (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978).

Perret, Geoffrey. Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur (New York: Random House, 1996).

Schaller, Michael. Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Priscilla Roberts

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Macmillan, Maurice Harold

MACMILLAN, MAURICE HAROLD (1894–1986)

Harold Macmillan was born in Cadogan Place, London, and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford (1912–14). Strongly influenced in his youth by Ronald Knox, later a leading convert to Catholicism, Macmillan nevertheless remained faithful to the Church of England. After serving as an officer on the Western Front in the Great War, he entered the family publishing house in 1920, a life that continued alongside the political career begun by his election as Conservative MP for Stockton in 1924. Macmillan was an outsider in the Conservative Party of interwar Britain. Opposed to what he saw as socialism’s bureaucracy and politics of envy, he nevertheless repeatedly called for planning to level up society during the 1930s, culminating in his The Middle Way (1938). He was also an ardent anti-appeaser. It was not until the Second World War that he obtained office, serving alongside

Dwight D. Eisenhower in North Africa in 1943–45. The Clement Attlee government (1945–51) tempered his enthusiasm for planning. Returning to office as minister of housing and local government in 1951–54, he liberalized regulation and used the private sector to deliver the Conservative pledge to build 300,000 houses per annum. Briefly minister of defense (1954–55), he tried hard to encourage détente when foreign secretary (April–December 1955). Overseas problems, notably the cold war, Middle East conflict, European integration, Anglo-American relations and decolonization, continued to dominate his concerns as chancellor of the exchequer (1955–57) and prime minister (1957–63). Macmillan’s vision for European integration did not win out, and he failed to secure British membership of the EEC (European Economic Community) in 1961–63. However, he was more successful in managing Anglo-American relations, as well as presiding over the smooth demission of the vast bulk of Britain’s colonial empire. Domestically, his policies remain exemplars of pragmatic, compassionate conservatism.

As befitted a publisher, Macmillan was a voracious reader, meticulously recording each work read in the diaries he kept from 1943 to 1945 and 1950 to 1966. Even in his first full year as prime minister in 1958, he read 73 books. Famously the prime minister who regularly went to bed with a Trollope, he also favored other nineteenth-century novelists, notably Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott (and more occasionally Tolstoy). These staples he consistently returned to, as they helped him to unwind in periods of tension. His reading of contemporary novelists was more selective, though Aldous Huxley seems to have been a favorite. Biography, however, could be equally relaxing. Macmillan commented on July 23, 1959, “I find these 19th century memoirs soothing. They had just as many difficulties and crises as we do. But they did not live in the terrible world produced by 2 wars, with its frightful losses and the prospect of a third” (Macmillan 2003– ). Generally speaking, less than half of Macmillan’s reading was of fiction. Apart from occasional forays into theology or literary criticism, the rest was made up of biographies, memoirs, diaries, and history. Eighteenthand nine- teenth-century political history was particularly favored, but Macmillan’s historical interests went much wider. Occasionally this reading was prompted by current concerns; for instance, he prepared for his 1959 trip to Moscow by reading Vasili Klyuchevsky’s Peter the Great. Generally, he preferred a history of events and individuals, as can be seen from the fact that about a quarter of his reading was of biographies.

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Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz)

Archives

Macmillan’s diaries and papers are held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Much relevant material from his ministerial career can also be found in the Public Record Office, London, notably the PREM11 class list covering the Prime Minister’s office 1951–64.

Printed Sources

Horne, Alistair. Macmillan, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1988–89).

Macmillan, Harold. The Macmillan Diaries, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 2003, 2005).

———.Memoirs, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1966–73).

———.War Diaries: The Mediterranean 1943–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1984).

Peter P. Catterall

MALCOLM X (EL-HAJJ MALIK EL-SHABAZZ) (1925–1965)

Malcolm Little, who adopted the name Malcolm X when he became a member of the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), was born May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Louise Norton Little, a homemaker, and Earl Little, a Baptist minister and supporter of Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Threatened by the Ku Klux Klan for “stirring up trouble” in the Black community with his “back to Africa” sermons, Earl Little moved his family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then to Lansing, Michigan, where he continued to preach. On November 7, 1929, the Littles’ home was burned to the ground. Less than two years later, Earl Little was run over by a streetcar. Ten years later, Louise Little suffered a nervous breakdown. Declared legally insane, she was committed to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo, where she remained for 26 years, leaving her children in the hands of distant relatives and foster parents.

Deemed unmanageable, Malcolm was placed in a juvenile detention center in Lansing. In 1946, after being arrested for a series of drug-related crimes, Malcolm (also known as “Detroit Red”) spent several years in prison, where he was introduced to the teachings of Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad. Upon his release, Malcolm dedicated his life to the Nation of Islam and eventually assumed the role of minister of New York Temple No. 7, where he met his future wife, Betty Sanders (Shabazz). On February 21, 1965, Malcolm was assassinated while addressing an audience at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom on the goals of his fledgling Organization of Afro-American Unity, the secular branch of Muslim Mosque, Inc., designed “to bring the Negro struggle from the level of civil rights to the level of human rights.” As noted in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm’s conversion to the Nation of Islam ignited his lifelong passion for learning. And although he eventually severed his ties with the Black Muslims and changed his name from Malcolm X to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz following a pilgrimage to Mecca—a decision that caused a rift with his friend Muhammad Ali—Malcolm credited the organization with saving his life.

Although his formal education ended with the eighth grade, Malcolm read voraciously. His readings included a broad spectrum of linguistic and historical works, including Webster’s English Dictionary, the Koran, the complete works of Shakespeare, and Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language. Convinced that “[o]f all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” Malcolm focused his attention on historical works ranging from ancient Egypt to the present. He also

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Malraux, André George

admired the works of renowned photojournalist Gordon Parks and the writings of James Baldwin, whom he considered to be one of the few Black writers who told the truth.

Archives

Archives at Emory University Library, Atlanta, Georgia: Personal and official letters and other documents.

Printed Sources

Carson, Clayborne. Malcolm X: The FBI File, David Gallen (ed.), (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991). A transcript of the files maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Malcolm X from 1953 until his death.

Gallen, David. Malcolm X: As They Knew Him (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992). Twentyfive men and women who knew Malcolm X share their stories.

Malcolm X. Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley) [1964] (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973).

———. Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary, George Breitman (ed.), (New York: Betty Shabazz and Pathfinder Press, 1992). A collection of speeches from the last year of his life.

———. Malcolm X on Afro-American History (New York: Betty Shabazz and Pathfinder Press, 1985). Excerpts from various speeches and The Autobiography.

———. Malcolm X: The Final Speeches, Steve Clark (ed.), (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992). Malcolm X’s final speeches reflect his changing attitude from Black Nationalism to internationalism.

———. Malcolm X Speaks, George Breitman (ed.), (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976). Includes “Message to the Grass Roots,” “The Ballot or the Bullet,” and “To Mississippi Youth.”

———. Malcolm X: Speeches at Harvard, Archie Epps (ed.), (New York: Paragon House, 1991). Includes three speeches presented at Harvard Law School Forum.

Durthy A. Washington

MALRAUX, ANDRÉ GEORGE (1901–1976)

Born in 1901 in Paris, France, André Malraux was the only son of Fernand and Berthe Malraux. His parents separated when he was four, and Malraux was raised by his mother and grandmother in the Paris suburb of Bondy. He attended the École de Bondy from age 5 to age 13, and the École Primaire Supérieure until the age of 17, after which he periodically attended lectures at the École des Langues Orientales and the École de Louvre. His vast knowledge of literature and art, cultivated by years of voracious reading in the public library at Bondy and among the bookstalls of Paris, allowed him to move easily within the fervid literary culture of Paris in the 1920s. He wrote articles and book reviews for numerous literary journals and quickly made a name for himself as a critic and scholar of unusual scope and brilliance.

Despite his intellectual accomplishments, however, Malraux craved a life of action. He came of age amid the devastation of France by the First World War. “We were surrounded by corpses. We were people whose fields had been ploughed up by history” (Lacouture 1975, 17). With other nations, similarly ravaged by history, Malraux felt a certain solidarity. He fought on the Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War. He opposed the French colonial governments in Morocco and

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