Far Right Rehash

...Compared to Arnold For-ster and Benjamin R. Epstein's new book, Danger on the Right, with its wealth of carefully collected data on the ideology, tactics, personalities, and interconnections of the radical right, the Overstreets' book reads like a college sophomore's weak research paper, rehashing the obvious...

...Furthermore, the book was published in October, 1964, reaching a wide reading public on the eve of a national election in which the nature of the radical right was a central issue...

...There is so much concentration on sweet reasonableness, such a fixed determination to portray Americans as middle-of-the-roaders who will leap safely back to moderation if only the doctrines and tough tactics of the radical right are briefly mentioned and chided, that no true picture of devia-tionist movements in America emerges at all...

...Third, the Overstreets fail to cite or to use any of the fundamental and penetrating literature about conspiratorial movements in America or the radical right in particular...

...Its authors are good people, whose humanity and dedication to democratic ends and means appear in every chapter...

...For this reviewer, at least, what must be said is that this book can safely be ignored by anyone who has been following discussions of the radical right in the mass media during the past four years...

...While no works such as these are cited, quoted, or used in paraphrase, the Overstreets do rely on authority once in a while...

...This is attacked by the Overstreets as unfair because it rests on nothing more than allegations about Milton Eisenhower's support for the New Deal and his defense of Owen Lattimore at Johns Hopkins...

...Second, no real understanding is conveyed by this book about the nature of conspiratorial movements in America, or the dynamics of the link between the radical right and "hard conservatives," or the psychological and sociological factors that lead people to join the radical right...

...Unless one sets up such standards, what can one say in criticism of this sincere and influential book...

...And for readers of magazines like The Progressive, it is wholly useless...

...The authors do not present it as a disciplined work of political theory or political sociology, or as an "inside expose" in the John Roy Carlson fashion...

...This may be good oratory for civic meetings, but it hardly deserves to be called sound history or social analysis...

...As its sales have mounted, one visualizes thousands of Americans who read the authors' earlier work, What We Must Know About Communism, now receiving a helpful companion work on the ideology and tactics of the radical rightists...

...First, The Strange Tactics of Extremism has no new facts, nor does it marshal well-known facts in any original or fresh fashion...

...For this public, the Over-streets' reputation and respectability carry conviction, and certainly their concluding chapter, "The Task Ahead of Us," is a useful call for dialogue between liberal and conservative and a consolidation against the attacks of the radical right...

...The leading examples of sources they refer their readers to are J. Edgar Hoover's report on Soviet espionage to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1960 and Senator Thomas Dodd's attack on critics of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1964...

...To give only one example, they quote and deplore the following comment from Robert Welch's book, The Politician: "In my opinion the chances are very strong that Milton Eisenhower is actually Dwight Eisenhower's superior and boss within the whole Leftwing Establishment...

...And, when men like Roscoe Drummond and John Fischer praise pudding like this without making the proper reservations and qualifications, they have let their opposition to the radical right control their intellectual and literary standards...

...Given all of these facts, who could be so deficient in right-thinking and civic commitment to challenge such a volume...

...balanced, fair-minded and scrupulously documented, and you don't have to be a professional political scientist to read it with profit...

...Reviewed by Alan F. Westin T Tarry and Bonaro Overstreet's book, The Strange Tactics of Extremism, is what Nineteenth Century reviewers would undoubtedly have called a "right-thinking" book...

...But for anyone who is used to a diet of intellectual meat, the Overstreets' book will probably seem like a seven-course meal of tapioca pudding...

...For example, it is doubtful whether they could have written as shallow an account as they have if they had read books such as Edward Shils' The Torment of Secrecy or The Radical Right, edited by Daniel Bell...

...Though it has eight chapters on the Birch Society, and one chapter each on Dan Smoot, Carl Mc-Intire, Myers Loman, Edgar Bundy, and Billy James Hargis, everything the Over-streets present has been conveyed before in half a dozen well-known books and dozens of major articles about the radical right, and usually with more color and depth...

...What the Overstreets overlook completely is that this is the 1963, toned-down version of that quote...

...The target of their book—the radical right—is unquestionably a divisive, anti-democratic, and bullying force in American civic life, deserving every reasoned and accurate attack that it gets...

...It was no surprise, therefore, to see Roscoe Drum-mond hail it in the Saturday Review as a "calm book on a hot subject, written by the right authors in the right spirit and at exactly the right time," or that John Fischer of Harper's praised it for several pages as "the most useful book I have read this fall...

...In the original version of The Politician, which Welch circulated until criticism got too hot even for him, this sentence read: "The chances are very strong that Milton Eisenhower is actually Dwight Eisenhower's superior and boss within the Communist Party...

...In short, the only value of this book lies in its ability to reach a reading public which might not accept a volume such as the Anti-Defamation League-sponsored Danger on the Right, because of its Jewish and liberal auspices, or a book like Bell's The Radical Right, because of its serious intellectual tone...

...Not only is their factual base thin, but they rarely know enough about the radical right to make proper use of what they have...