One of America’s smartest magazines published a Molotov cocktail how-to in 1967
‘A riot represents people making history’
A detailed diagram of how to put together a Molotov cocktail was probably not what most readers of The New York Review of Books would have been expecting on the magazine’s cover, but in the summer of 1967, that is what they found.
In large, capitalized black type, “Violence and the Negro” read the coverline of the August 24, 1967 issue. Beneath that were the titles of the issue’s two feature articles in bright red, one by journalist Andrew Kopkind about “King & Black Power” and one by activist Tom Hayden on what he called “The Occupation of Newark,” referring to the riots the city had witnessed in mid-July, kicked off by an act of police brutality against a black cab driver.
Beneath the text on the left-wing broadsheet, taking up half the cover, was a labeled line-drawing of a Molotov cocktail. More than just an image, it was a schematic, basically a set of directions for how to make one of the incendiary DIY devices. One-third of a glass bottle should contain “dirt & small amount of soap powder,” two-thirds filled with “gasoline (from pump),” and the neck stopped up with a bit of “gas-soaked rag” into which is stuck a “fuse (clothesline).”
The gesture proved as divisive and combustible as the object it depicted, not least because Hayden’s piece on the Newark riots registered as a statement in support of violence. In it, Hayden describes how “two Molotov cocktails exploded high on the western wall of the precinct” and “the people, now numbering at least 500 on the street, let out a gasp of excitement.” The piece includes observations that during the rebellion, people felt they were “creating a community of their own” and that against both liberal and conservative views that rioting is “less-than-civilized behavior,” a third view must be considered, that “a riot represents people making history.”
The Molotov cocktail issue was a flashpoint in an already heated debate about the role and the direction of the New Left. Perhaps even more than that, it set a radical new standard against which a burgeoning conservative movement could define itself.
The New York Review of Books had launched only four years prior in 1963, the brainchild of a group of writers tired of what they saw as a flatlining intellectual culture dominated by vapid, fame-seeking acquiescence and timidity. Writer Elizabeth Hardwick — an NYRB founder — had diagnosed the problem in a spirited but scathing 1959 Harper’s piece titled, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” in which she lamented that the media was full of “praise of everything in sight.” “A universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns,” she wrote. “A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory.”
The NYRB sought to fill the intellectual vacuum, raising the bar for American literary criticism and political analysis and functioning as a forum for complicated and provocative ideas. Its longtime editor Robert Silvers believed “book reviewing can be a way of bringing critical perspectives to bear on the most intense political issues,” and he surely tapped into something — the first issue of the Review was met with acclaim and quickly sold out its print run of 100,000 copies. The magazine soon became the go-to publication for left-leaning intellectuals, and during his 50-year tenure, Silvers gave prominent and rising writers alike freedom and space to make bold arguments and engage in long-winded combat.
With its choice to run the Molotov cocktail schematic, the Review wasn’t advocating violence, exactly (though it may have been condoning it). As James Wolcott wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1998, “clearly it was a symbolic gesture and not an actual incitement — no one expected assistant professors of English to start hurling firebombs at the Good Humor truck.” But still, it caused “a rift in the New York intellectual scene that earned The N.Y.R. the title of ‘chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic’ (Tom Wolfe’s phrase), had longtime friends giving each other the evil eye and spurred the formation of the neoconservative movement.”
There were also numerous critics who saw the NYRB’s gesture as part and parcel of a left-wing fascination with the glory of violent — especially revolutionary — resistance from within the relative safety of the largely white, middle-class academy. As sociologist Charles Kadushin put it in his 1974 book, The American Intellectual Elite, “I think this fashionable emphasis on violence comes from people who don’t have much experience with violence.”
Even Dennis Wrong, a sociologist who had appeared in the inaugural issue of the NYRB, wrote in 1970 that he’d noted “a new tone of extravagant, querulous, self-righteous anti-Americanism began to creep into the NYR’s reports on Vietnam.” Esquire took it even further, writing in 1971 that “the next Stalin, and his speechwriters, will emerge” from among the NYRB’s contributors. Roger Kimball, conservative editor of The New Criterion, would later call Robert Silvers and the NYRB’s “haughty, cerebral” brand of socially engaged intellectualism “instinctively anti-American.”
Two months after the fateful 1967 issue, Irving Howe penned a withering diagnosis of what he saw as the Left’s new fanaticism that appeared in — where else? — the NYRB. “Radicalism is again becoming chic in the intellectual world,” he wrote. “This is not, to be sure, the radicalism of desperate Negroes and disaffected youth which, for all its political failings, is at least grounded in urgent experience. No; the ‘radicalism’ now arising in the intellectual world is in quality and content as crude, fashion-driven, smugly moralistic, and supremely verbal as was the turn to conservatism in the Fifties. It is a ‘radicalism’ of posture, gesture, and frisson. It is a ‘radicalism’ of a vicarious and thereby corrupt apocalyptic fantasy: to make an omelette you need not only break eggs, you need a strong dash of black blood.”
(It was a response to a response to a piece he’d written, by communist-leaning Partisan Review founder Philip Rahv. In classic NYRB style, Rahv then replied again to Howe in the magazine’s pages, with a long letter beginning, “Irving Howe seems to be very angry. Too bad.”)
But for all the grandiloquence of the NYRB’s cast of regulars, it wasn’t all just circular and masturbatory exegesis. In fact, even when the language was slick or the tone glib, the stakes of the debate were high, and not only because they would influence the direction of the political elites and their parties. As lethal violence was erupting during the Long Hot Summer, the civil rights, women’s rights, and soon, gay rights movements were coalescing and making their demands, and with the first Vietnam draft lottery less than two years away, the very lives of some Americans were on the line.
The NYRB would go on to become one of the country’s strongest voices against the administration of President George W. Bush and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, as even the Left drifts ever rightward, it has also drawn the condemnation of those who see it as a forum for apologists of a centrist liberalism. In a remembrance of Robert Silvers in The New Yorker following his death in March of 2017, Nicholas Lemann wrote that the Molotov cocktail cover imparted the somewhat misleading sense that Silvers was a radical. Rather, Lemann says, “Bob wanted to affect the system, not blow it up — and he did.”
