Old Stories: Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's

How the 1970's Started

On January 14, 1970, something new happened, so far as the elites of New York are concerned. Others only became aware of it when Tom Wolfe, journalist and novelist, published his story in New York magazine 20 weeks later. Soon the entire country heard about it on the evening news. Everyone had something to say about it, from low to high alike. I was only nine years old at the time, so not really part of the conversation, but I kinda remember some jibber-jabber at the time. So what was all the fuss about?

Leonard Bernstein was a celebrity in some circles. He was the very popular and very public conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He ran with the most elite crowd in our nation’s cultural capital. He was also a very civic man and a prodigious musical talent. He and his wife were active in a lot of causes, but the one that blew up and caused all the ruckus was the party they threw at their beautiful Manhattan duplex condo for the Black Panthers.

The Bernsteins and Black Panther (Don Cox?)

You might have heard about the Black Panthers. In the late 60’s and early 70’s they were the vanguard of social change; a militarized group of blacks that sought the overthrow of the US ‘system’ because they believed this was the only way to end racism and lift the black race from their ghetto lives. In the end, they murdered their bookkeeper when she discovered that they were dealing drugs in the very communities they were supposed to be helping. David Horowitz, who at the time was the editor of the far left magazine Ramparts came to the same conclusion (he knew the bookkeeper, Betty Louise Van Patter), and his revulsion at his previous allegiance to the Panthers caused him to completely reject the left’s program. His 1996 memoir, Radical Son tells the whole story.

So the idea that the very wealthy and cultural elite, the upper crust as it were, would invite the Panthers into their homes to hobnob with other very wealthy elites, eat “roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts” and discuss politics and social change with the Panthers is quite unbelievable. The New York Times actually sent their society columnist to report on the party!

Tom Wolfe also managed to slip into the party. And it’s his account that was published as Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.

To read Radical Chic is to just shake your head; it’s hilarious on one hand how strange the whole evening must have been - society ladies all excited to meet their “first Black Panther” and the Panthers themselves so completely out of place among the exquisite trappings of a Manhattan duplex where every rug and table and picture frame is many year’s salary of an average Joe. On the other hand, you must also wonder at why high society people would want to rub elbows with the Black Panthers? I mean in the 1960’s they could have easily visited the union workers at any number of factories, or garment workers right there in New York (they still existed in 1970). What status polishing did they achieve by partying with the Panthers exactly?

It’s a question worth asking because the motivation, whatever it is, has now overtaken the whole of our college educated class. What in 1970 was seen as bizarre, and criticized by so many including leading black organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League, has now trickled down into every fissure of American life. Here’s one description of radical chic:

[Wolfe's] subject is how culture's patrician classes – the wealthy, fashionable intimates of high society – have sought to luxuriate in both a vicarious glamour and a monopoly on virtue through their public espousal of street politics: a politics, moreover, of minorities so removed from their sphere of experience and so absurdly, diametrically, opposed to the islands of privilege on which the cultural aristocracy maintain their isolation, that the whole basis of their relationship is wildly out of kilter from the start. ... In short, Radical Chic is described as a form of highly developed decadence; and its greatest fear is to be seen not as prejudiced or unaware, but as middle-class.

So in order not to be seen as one of the dull, middlebrow, unindividuated blob known as the middle class, you reach down to find the most esoteric populations to build your status resume. “I’m not one of the vast mindless multitude, I ate roquefort morsels rolled in crushed nuts with a Black Panther!” seems to the be the zeitgeist of the party at Lenny’s. The only problem, before it all blew up, was how to find white servants!

Rob Henderson wrote a book, Troubled, about how his fellow students at Yale had all kinds of strange ideas, luxury beliefs as he calls them, that they themselves did not adhere to but which they were willing to espouse. For example, to deride the idea of two parent families is now very common among the Radical Chic social set, the grandchildren of the 70’s, while they are also the most likely to marry, stay married and raise their children together. (Not sure if that sentence deserves an exclamation point or a question mark, so I’ll leave it as is.)

Of course Henderson would notice this after a youth in foster care and broken homes; but it’s not hard to see across not only the US but the entire west that luxury beliefs are now the currency of the educated class. To espouse them is to gain membership to some exclusive club of fellow status travelers. It’s not enough, for example, to accept homosexuality. Most of the middle class shrugs at the idea of gay marriage. To elevate your status you must understand that male and female are ‘social constructs’, and then accept all the strange downstream ideas. Engage with young people online and you’ll see that they are unable to explain any of these ideas, but are adept at simply writing you off as ‘doesn’t get it’ by which they mean ‘we are above you and you’re not worthy of engagement’. It’s the mental equivalent of a 19th Century dandy on a horse with his riding crop clearing the masses out his way. But at least he was willing to ride his horse among the unwashed; he didn’t invite them to the manor house to goggle eye them!

Well, if you want a good laugh at the fools in their penthouse apartments, bored to death with their own social circle where they’ve all read the same high brow articles about the ills of society and now can’t possibly face the small minded working stiffs down in the streets, then Radical Chic is for you. You’ll laugh yourelf silly at some of the nonsense, like the description of one high society matron who, after the ruckus caused by Lenny’s party, decides to lower the status temperature of her ‘cause’ soiree and serves spaghetti and tossed salad to her Puerto Rican gang members! Honestly.

And you can read it online here: https://nymag.com/docs/07/05/070529radical_chic.pdf