Leftwashing

I watched ‘Maestro’, the recent film about the life of the great American conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre. Something important was missing. Their lifetime of political activism was not mentioned once. And yet, Bernstein’s FBI file was over 800 pages long. Civil rights, opposition to Vietnam, nuclear disarmament, they did it all — and were constantly attacked for it in the American press. All traces have been leftwashed from the record: the viewer will leave the cinema thinking Bernstein was a wonderful musician and a serially unfaithful husband, with there being nothing besides the music and the sex.

Relatively few people can claim that a new phrase was coined against them by people desperate for a quick smear. The Bernsteins are in that select group thanks to ‘Radical Chic — that Party at Lenny’s’ — a 1970 attack piece by Tom Wolfe against famous people who, supposedly, get involved with radical causes because it advances their social standing. It is that supposed propensity that became known as ‘radical chic’.

The reason the US establishment needed to attack an American household name? The Bernsteins held a fundraising meeting for the Panther 21 — a group of Black Panther members accused of bombing and firearms attacks against police stations and, in 1971, acquitted after it turned out that police infiltrators played key organising roles. It was the longest and most expensive trial in New York State history to date.

It is, of course, hard to include everything into a movie about multifaceted people. Undoubtedly, Bernstein’s conducting and composition had to take centre-stage. So did his wife’s acting. His affairs with men, however, did not merit the amount of attention they were given. Besides, enough of their life details were mentioned in passing (such as Felicia’s relationship with the actor Richard Hart, which she embarked on after her first engagement to Bernstein broke down, and which only ended after Hart’s untimely death in 1951) to think that the social activism could have also got a mention. Surely the combined cinematic talents of Spielberg and Scorsese could have woven in a few references to a national scandal? The failure to do so is clearly a choice.

As well as helping unfairly accused African-Americans defend themselves, the Bernsteins were heavily into pretty much every postwar progressive cause — and Leonard himself even into some pre-war ones, staging a production of the recently banned ‘the Cradle will Rock’, a controversial 1937 musical about labour relations, corruption and corporate greed in the US. Civil rights, women’s rights, opposition to the Vietnam war, nuclear disarmament — they were involved in all, whilst Felicia, through her connections with Chile, campaigned to expose the abuses of the Pinochet regime. After she died, Leonard established the Felicia Montealegre Bernstein fund with Amnesty International in her name, to support human rights activists around the world.

The backlash, of course, was not confined to Wolfe’s hit piece. On the FBI watchlist since the late 40’s, Leonard was briefly blacklisted during the McCarthy trials for suspected Communist sympathies. The 1970 party in support of the Black Panthers led to a widespread campaign in the media, a boycott of Bernstein’s concerts by President Nixon and even accusations of anti-semitism.

The fact that Bernstein was a supporter of Israel and opponent of the Soviet Union, and so could not have possibly been accused of Communism, did not help to rehabilitate him. Frequent concerts in Israel, including in 1967 after the capture of East Jerusalem, support for the dissident Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and a concert in the re-unified Berlin in 1989 firmly nailed his colours to the mast in that regard. In spite of all that, he was, in today’s parlance, woke, and that was that. That legacy needs to be memory-holed, covered in silence underneath the personal stuff like love affairs and parent-child relationships.

There seems to be a concerted effort to rewrite the history of the postwar years and the progressive nature of many of its leading lights. Bernstein is considered a national treasure in both America and Israel (with whom he had a long professional association as well as himself being Jewish), and it is not a done thing to highlight the fact that such a luminary could have been a progressive leftist, fighting against injustice. Because that leads people to question how many of today’s leftists will, after death, be similarly venerated. This amply illustrates the principle of leftwashing.