Irving G. Thalberg.
Members of the Thalberg family had been invited to attend Oscar night, and at one point a TV camera panned them all in their seats: the great man’s daughter, a granddaughter, others. The one person notably absent was Irving Thalberg Jr. In his eyes–or so his widow says today–the Academy Awards were “bullshit.” He would later say that he did appreciate the film clips of his–father, but the choice of Spielberg would not have been his own. Spielberg was too commercial a filmmaker for the son’s taste. “Irving never went to see a single Spielberg film,” says Deborah Pellow, who was his second wife, “because he thought they were a waste of time.”
“There was something else about him, though. If you were his friend, if your academic career was flagging or your personal life was in disarray, he would appear and quietly make some good points. He would tell you not to give up the faith. There were times when [the Red Squad] lawsuit was not going well at all, for instance. In legal circles I was kind of a laughingstock, and it was difficult to get funding or support from established lawyers. I remember Irving saying to me ‘This is important, and I’ll be there for you, at your benefits or whatever. Keep at it.’ This sort of thing sustained me in large part.”
At Circle, where Thalberg was first an associate and then a full professor, he taught courses on ethics, free will, action theory, and more. The classes were small, and Thalberg, whom most people took to be painfully shy, did little to galvanize them. “He was definitely not charismatic,” remembers Sandra Bartky, a longtime associate. He could be described, rather, as polite, scrupulous, and altogether nonauthoritarian. Student papers were returned precisely on time, and marked with carefully constructed, invariably helpful comments. He never talked down to his students. “He simply appreciated what students did,” says Vivian Weil, who now teaches philosophy at the Illinois Institute of Technology but was once Thalberg’s graduate student.
Reviewers, while flattering in the main, felt that Thalberg the philosopher was being too nice. Wrote David Pears in the Times Literary Supplement: “[Thalberg’s] method is therapeutic, and in each case his idea is intended to release us from a dilemma by showing us how to combine the advantages of thesis and anti-thesis without their disadvantages–Hegel in Freudian clothes by Wittgenstein.”
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His most famous work was a 1972 paper titled “Visceral Racism.” “We see black violence,” Thalberg wrote, “and overlook the history of official lawlessness toward blacks.” The Watts riot should properly be called “a rebellion,” he argued, comparable to the uprising in Prague against the Soviet occupation in 1968. Violence perpetrated by the Black Panther Party is self-defense, he seemed to say at one point. Finally he sounded a trumpet: “Visceral racists like ourselves, once we have stopped misperceiving things, have strong professed reasons for immediate and drastic change.”
Thalberg made himself helpful to many young minority and female philosophers. Howard McGary relied on him as an unofficial thesis adviser while McGary was still at Minnesota, and during the three years McGary taught at UIC in the mid-70s they had lunch together two or three times a week. “Of all the people who had a hand in my career,” says McGary, now an associate professor at Rutgers, “Irving Thalberg played a major, major role.” Lawrence Thomas met Thalberg in 1978 when Thomas delivered a paper at a conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. Out of the blue Irving approached Thomas, then in his late 20s, and flattered him on his work. They remained in touch. “When I was young and really green,” says Thomas, a professor at Oberlin, “this guy gave me enormous amounts of time. You expect that from your mentors, but, God, we had just met.”
