Party Politics
Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic”

Felicia & Leonard Bernstein with Black Panthers leader Donald L. Cox in January 1970. (Image source: GetArchive)

2,717 words

They [the Black Panthers] exist as a continual barometer to measure ourselves against — both in terms of lessons that have been garnered as well as challenges in terms of where we can improve and deepen our analysis. — Ainslin Pulley, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Chicago

The place had sunk back into its wonted quiet. The blended murmur of the unceasing city, which during the party had been shut out and forgotten, now penetrated the walls of the great building and closed it once more upon these lives. The noises of the street were heard again. — Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

In a few short weeks during the summer of 2020, the loose collective Black Lives Matter (BLM) went from street gang to major marketing brand. The American media was right behind it, having long been praying for a black martyr to undergo death by cop after the practice runs of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. They needed the coming together of a white cop and a dead black so badly they even did a paint job on George Zimmerman, the self-identifying Hispanic security guard who killed Martin. He became an honorary white man just for the occasion, but still the expected bushfire didn’t quite take, and the politico-media complex had to wait for May of 2020.

When George Floyd, his failing system full of drugs, died at the hands of an unfortunate cop who was following procedure when dealing with black career criminals, the heavens opened and a saint descended unto Earth. Murals of a canonized Floyd, a worthless human being the world was better off without, appeared on walls across impoverished, mostly black American cities. These were the same cities BLM, with the help of antifa, tried to burn to the ground in subsequent rioting, and succeeded, with many black-owned businesses as collateral damage. Within months, some of America’s leading corporations were throwing the biggest fundraiser in the history of black activism. The cash was pouring in, and moneyed whites across the Western world were kneeling to their new black masters. This included Britain’s new Prime Minister. But wasn’t all this fundraising for black agitators eerily familiar?

Over half a century earlier, in June of 1970, there had been another fundraiser for militant black activism, but it wasn’t faceless company CEOs loosening the corporate purse strings for a good cause; it was the world’s most famous classical conductor and his wife. Leonard and Felicia Bernstein — a name the conductor himself insisted was pronounced –stein and not –steen — hosted a party in their New York penthouse, an evening which Bernstein would later describe as “a civil liberties meeting.” Present were not only the cream of America’s socialites, but a number of leaders of the Black Panther movement.

Also present was New York Times journalist Charlotte Curtis, who sensed the irony of the evening:

There they were, the Black Panthers from the ghetto and the black and white liberals from the middle, upper-middle and upper classes studying one another over the expensive furnishings, the elaborate flower arrangements, the cocktails and the silver trays of canapés.

But it would be another piece of journalism which engraved that party in the nation’s psyche when New York magazine published a near-novella-length piece by Tom Wolfe which birthed a new phrase in the political lexicon: “That Party at Lenny’s: Radical Chic.” Wolfe did not coin the phrase, but merely filched it from minor Jewish Beat Generation writer Seymour Krim, who had used it for the first time in January of the same year. It is a surprise that Wolfe wasn’t accused of anti-Semitism, as he predictably was when opposing real-estate mogul Aby Rosen’s plans for New York’s Upper East Side in 2006 (Wolfe was also a noted architectural critic). The same accusation was levelled at him after Radical Chic.

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Wolfe paints a picture of the far-from-idle rich who have tried every type of respectable philanthropy, and now want something with more edge, something literally a little darker. When the poor people gawp at you and your lifestyle, that is to be expected, but when your super-rich peer group is no longer chattering about how maaahvellous your shindigs are, it’s time to wow them with a new angle. Enter the Black Panthers to share the canapés.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense — later shortened to just The Black Panther Party — began in Oakland in 1966 when two blacks, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, bought two shotguns with the proceeds from selling 2,000 copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book to fellow blacks. They soon picked up fellow travelers, and the movement coalesced. By the time of Bernstein’s party, the so-called “Panther 21” were in jail on suspicion of planning a bombing campaign, and the Panthers’ mounting legal costs forced them to cast around for outside financing. This is what led to “that party at Lenny’s.” The Bernsteins’ party was not the first such activist-supporting gathering, and Wolfe gives an inventory of society high-fliers who had held similar bashes in the weeks prior. But “Radical Chic” would ensure it was this particular example of what The New York Times would later call “elegant slumming” that marked its place in journalistic history and gave birth to a new phrase.

Radical Chic opens — and closes — with a bizarre dream sequence in which Bernstein dreams of a large black man rising up from inside his grand piano to pour cold water on the conductor’s planned anti-war speech onstage. Wolfe then jump-cuts like a film director to the party itself, and Bernstein realizing this is very far from being a dream:

That huge Black Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver.

The hard-nosed reality of inviting dangerous thugs into a penthouse duplex to rub shoulders with the super-rich is, as Wolfe will imply throughout, a big part of the thrill. “These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big,” he notes in the voice of a female guest. “These are real men.” From there on in, Wolfe will link the relationship between the Panthers and high society in the reader’s mind like pearls on the strings some of Bernstein’s guests are nervously fingering. It is the fascination of a phrase Wolfe repeats, nostalgie de la boue, which has the Rousseauist meaning of “nostalgia for the mud.” The Panther women, for example, with their Afro-urban dress sense, look “as if they’d stepped out of the pages of Vogue, although no doubt Vogue got it from them.”

Every party needs planning, and it is fascinating to watch the clockwork of the Jewish mind align itself to fit circumstance. The waiting staff are not, of course, black, but Latino, a nice touch by the Bernsteins. Some didn’t miss the chance for a bit of role-play themselves, like civil rights philanthropist Elinor Guggenheimer:

Two friends of mine who happen to be . . . not white — that’s what I hate about the times we live in, the terms — well, they’ve agreed to be butler and maid, and I’m going to be a maid myself!

This deference foreshadows a lot of white self-hatred to come (we’re living through it now), and journalist and broadcaster Barbara Walters seems to reach a shattering insight in the strange Q&A into which the party devolves. Looking at one of the brawny, dangerous Panthers, she is referring to her own, white super-class when she says, “We have to go.” It’s a strange evolution, this rich, white ethnomasochism which has only now reached its apogee. It’s a question of mistaking who it is that actually represents the danger. Recently, we’ve seen the violence, mayhem, and kiddie-car ideology of BLM force a lot of whites to squeeze out tears as well as cash. Watch the change between the night of Lenny’s party and today. Take J. Edgar Hoover. He was a bastard, but he was America’s bastard, and he was plain-speaking about the Panthers, calling them “the greatest threat to US security.” Does that sound familiar to you today, if you substitute “white supremacists” for “Black Panthers”? Perhaps we need a street gang and a uniform of our own, then rich chicks might dig us.

The Panthers were a threat, of course, but precisely because of their appeal to bored and rootless whites rather than their own Mickey Mouse manifesto. Their list of demands sounded like a malevolent child’s Christmas letter to Santa. What we want, it begins, a phrase which has been a mantra for blacks who know they can leverage white guilt ever since. Military exemption for blacks, release of all black prisoners (because they can’t have had fair trials, ipso facto, as the judiciary were overwhelmingly white at that time), “an educational system that represents the true nature of this decadent society,” and local decision-making powers (that’s worked well in the black-run cities of today). That party at Lenny’s was fleece whitey night. Oh, and they wanted peace, too, and if not peace then, you know, the other stuff. “All unarmed blacks are slaves,” they intoned, and no one wants to be that.

When Don Cox, “Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party,” invokes Malcom X, it is to tell the assembled that “We will defend ourselves by any means necessary,” and Wolfe pounces on Cox’s statement to the guests that “If someone came in and attacked them or their families, I don’t think there’s anyone here who wouldn’t defend themselves.”

Wolfe stifles a journalistic guffaw as he imagines what the non-Panther women present are thinking:

[E]very woman in the room thinks of her husband, with his cocoa-butter jowls and Dior Men’s Boutique pajamas, ducking into the bathroom and locking the door and turning the shower on so that later he can say he didn’t hear a thing.

But these guests, in their thousand-dollar outfits, have not been gathered together for self-defense classes. That’s all just a part of the one thing BLM really did learn from the Panthers: the art of the hustle. Like any good host, Bernstein himself gets the ball rolling:

Then the voice of Lenny from the back of the room: “As a guest of my wife” — he smiles – “I’ll give my fee for the next performance of Cavalleria Rusticana.” Comradely laughter. Applause. “I hope that will be four figures!”

I wonder whether the writer of that opera, Puccini’s friend Pietro Mascagni, would have approved. But the hat — or, rather, the Panther beret — is now being passed around, and is soon full to brimming. Wolfe treats the reader to a potted history of the New York nouveau riche, which is an informative history lesson in itself:

At the same time Society in New York was going through another of those new money upheavals that have made the social history of New York read like the political history of the Caribbean; which is to say, a revolution every 20 years, if not sooner.

The result of those revolutions was a superclass, a stratum of society which arranged the rest of the societal caste system for their convenience, including the dominance of Jews in both the media and the rag trade. And the upshot of all that was, well, that party at Lenny’s, and the welcome relief for bored rich people which led right up to the phrase Wolfe himself borrowed from a Jew, and it was itself due to a shift in social alignment:

The black movement itself, of course, had taken on a much more electric and romantic cast. What a relief it was — socially — in New York — when the leadership seemed to shift from middle class to . . . funky! From A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Martin Luther King and James Farmer . . . to Stokeley, Rap, LeRoi and Eldridge! This mean that the tricky business of the fashionable new politics could now be integrated with a tried and true social motif: nostalgie de la boue. The upshot was radical chic.

The Bernsteins had done their bit for the Black Panthers, and they had also done their bit for the Bernsteins in terms of public image, abroad as well as in America. Or so they thought. It’s Wolfe’s talent to remind us of the way the black man, with his message of love and peace, and who appeared from Bernstein’s piano in his dream, has rather scuffed Bernstein’s international reputation. Wolfe does this with a little metamedia:

What the Bernsteins probably did not realize at first was that the story was going out on the New York Times News Service wires. In other cities throughout the United States and Europe it was played on page one, typically, to an international chorus of horse laughs or nausea, depending on one’s Weltanschauung.

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Even then, and even for a rich New York Jew, virtue-signaling doesn’t always work out the way you want it to.

Radical Chic was huge in more ways than one. Considered as pure journalistic copy, it was gargantuan. We of the dissident Right are used to what the mainstream media call “long reads” (and we don’t have to follow the text with our fingers like some on the Left), but even Counter-Currents might balk at 25,000 words. That’s almost ten times the length of the piece you are reading. But Wolfe was smart enough to keep his polemical powder dry in “Radical Chic,” and in its companion piece, “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” the sparring gloves came off. This piece had nothing to do with high society and everything to do with street level, out of the Manhattan duplex and into the Oakland projects.

“Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” is a tour de force and a perfect complement to “Radical Chic.” To save you shelling out on the combination of the two in a resultant book, a facsimile of the original New York magazine print of “Radical Chic” is online, and a transcription of “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” is as well. The flak catchers were the white guys who went out into the black community to talk to the brothers, partly to pacify and partly to be the white god offering jobs and money, always the money. Wolfe sums up the high hustle of mau-mauing whites:

Brothers like the Chaser were the ones who perfected mau-mauing, but before long everybody in the so-called Third World was into it. Everybody was out mau-mauing up a storm, to see if they could win the victories the blacks had won. San Francisco, being the main point of entry for immigrants from all over the Pacific, had as many colored minorities as New York City. Maybe more. Blacks, Chicanos, Latinos, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, American Indians, Samoans — everybody was circling around the poverty program. By the end of 1968 there were eighty-seven different groups getting into the militant thing, getting into mau-mauing.

Wolfe, who always dressed like some Southern card-sharp from The Sting, had the style and the eye to spot a hustle.

Wolfe created “new journalism” the way Hunter S. Thompson brought “gonzo journalism” into being (but without the drugs, booze, and shotguns), and it is difficult to see a comparable movement coming out of today’s stale and practically government-run mainstream media. If anything, the dissident Right are the new breed, not so much for our stylistic innovations as for daring to rush in where the angels of the legacy media fear to tread.

So, “Radical Chic” wins big in three ways. As a piece of journalism, it is an exceptional read, 25,000 words or not. As a history of New York socialite philanthropy, and the fabulous pantheon of the gods of Manhattan/Olympus, it is instructive and illustrates America’s version of Britain’s famous class system. But the gold medal-winning angle Wolfe runs away with is its freeze-framing of the strange fascination that the white glitterati have for black men with guns, berets, and shades, with all their pop slogans and unrealistic aims thrown in. And, of course, the sheer animal magnetism of the black man for the rich person who doesn’t quite have everything. William F. Buckley, reviewing “Radical Chic,” notes the almost erotic yearning of the pampered, safe, super-rich man bringing the wild outdoors into his home, morbidly attracted to the time that “the panther devours him in his luxurious lair.”