CONSERVATIVES IN PROFILES

...left them in 1920...

...But since those first thirty years, my generation has added more than forty more years to its past...

...But Taft also foresaw at the time more clearly than Professor Radosh now sees in retrospect how much stronger Roosevelt and his successors had left the Democrats in 1948 than Wilson had...

...The proof of the pudding turned out, as usual, to be in the eating...

...Nor was I alone, during those years, in calling' aft five of them-and myself too-isolationists...

...What a contrast to Beard's solemn observation, set down in the year 1935: "The Jefferson party gave the nation the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and its participation in the World War...

...The Pacific War awaits...

...No other isolationist before, during or after the war command a fraction of the popular support that his senatorial career had brought him...

...Professor Radosh calls himself "a radical historian" and the Village Voice calls him "a long-time activist with the antiwar and Socialist movements...

...But the worst had yet to come...

...Professor Ronald Radosh who teaches history at the University of the City of New York has now reached the same age I did during the 1930s and describes all these men as "Conservative Critics of American Globalism...

...I say this New Deal is a fake," wrote Flynn in the New Republic in 1933, "It has been sold to our people as a great liberal revolution...

...He died in 1918, the victim of his over-estimate of the rate at which American technology and, with it American history, were accelerating...

...Beard lived until 1948, long enough (that is) to see America's involvement in the Second World War make the first half of his prophecy come true...

...Dennis never reached a mass audience...

...During the 1950s Flynn lost his hot head and became, for several years, a disciple of Senator Joe McCarthy...

...Far from preparing us to cope with the present, our experience has overwhelmed us...

...The first thirty years of my life spanned the First World War and its aftermath...

...Names change their meanings with the years and meanings their significance...

...If Professor Radosh's Prophets of the Right has done nothing else, his opening Profile of Charles A. Beard restores Beard to his rightful status as our outstanding pre-war and post-war isolationist, and the inclusion of four surplus Prophets of the Right establishes the book's definitive nature...

...But if Senator Taft was the one post-war isolationist who might have reversed America's course in 1948, Charles A. Beard became, posthumously, the first American historian of any persuasion to throw so much new light on the roots of our present tribulations and to suggest that still more revisions of the eras of the two Roosevelts are still in order.are still in order...

...When The Nation, the liberal -radical weekly that Villard had inherited from his father, dropped him and his weekly column in 1940 he had no other place to go...

...the first thirty years of Professor Radosh's life spanned the Second World War and its aftermath...

...Yet it was precisely this political career that brought about his undoing...

...when Lawrence Dennis called himself a fascist...

...But his personal friendship for Senator Vandenberg and his over-riding concern for party and national unity persuaded him to support the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1948...

...No other Republican leader foresaw more clearly the post-war let-down which he recognized the greatest political opportunity to come the Repubicans' way since 1920...

...Taft rejected the cold war and voted against American membership in NATO...

...The generation to which Professor Radosh belongs, on the other hand, can now recapture our past through selective study rather than at the turbulent school of experience...

...A different tragedy befell Senator Taft...

...He was a Horatio Alger hero-only in reverse...

...By the 1930s, another American historian, Charles A. Beard, more than thirty years younger than Adams, was predicting that the domestic policies of the American plutocracy would lead, first, to American intervention in foreign wars and global crusades and finally to permanent and fatal imperial expansion across the Pacific to the mainland of Asia...

...Here goes: in 1910, the historian Henry Adams announced the birth of the twentieth century with the prediction that American civilization would succumb within twenty years to the acceleration of its own technology...

...and only Robert Taft called himself a conservative...

...Since Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima I have become a reluctant globalist...

...Oswald Garrison Villard, a gentleman reformer of the old school, never had the semblance of a national following...

...No conscientious objector could match his idealism, no rhetorician his dialectic...

...Prophets of the Right therefore takes me back to the 1930s when Charles A. Beard, Oswald Garrison Villard, and John T. Flynn called themselves liberals...

...Professor Radosh's inclusion of Lawrence Dennis among the Prophets of the Right provides the touch of the bizarre that imparts the necessary element of authenticity to his book...

...He lived long enough to rue the tragedy that he had brought upon himself...

...John T. Flynn, on the other hand- whose belligerently isolationist, bitterly anti-Roosevelt column cost him his job on the New Republic-had long established himself as one of the most popular pleaders of the isolationist cause in books, magazines, pamphlets, broadcasts, and public debates...

...I called myself an unrepentant isolationist until Hitler's invasion of Russia...

...An incorruptible cynic, Dennis followed up his wartime indulgence of Hitler and Mussolini with a similar post-war indulgence of Stalin...

...Conservatives now call liberals totalitarians and totalitarians call liberals fascists while the ex-fascist Lawrence Dennis seems to have become the last of our free-enterprise liberals...

...In his introduction Professor Radosh argues that history requires us not to stay in the present but to return to the past and move toward the present of which we gain a new underQUINCY HOWE standing on our way...

...Taft had dared to condemn the Nuremberg trials but declined to make an issue of the dispatch of American troops to Western Europe and the Far East...

...By describing himself as a fascist-and even writing a book entitled The Coming American Fascism to prove it- Dennis assured himself an endless succession of public appearance in behalf of a point of view that few, if any, of his fellow graduates from Exeter or Harvard cared or dared to set forth...

...BOOKS CONSERVATIVES IN PROFILE Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism RONALD RADOSH Simon and Schuster, $9.95 My first seventy-five years have taught me that if you stick around long enough you will see everything-twice...

...And in Prophets on the Right Professor Radosh has done just that, thus enabling me, as a participant in some of the controversies covered in his book, to re-appraise some of his impressions of them in the fading light of my own...

...The cream of the jest came in 1952 when Eisenhower defeated Taft for the Republican presidential nomination by leading Taft's party down the bi-partisan foreign-policy road that Taft's own vacillations of 1948 had opened...

...At the age of 60 in 1932 his best years lay behind him and his firm, pacifist stand throughout both World Wars bears witness to his moral courage if not to his political wisdom...

...He would have had to live another thirty years to see America's involvement in Vietnam vindicate his ceaseless warnings against America's manifest destiny in Asia as preached by the first Roosevelt and practiced by the second Roosevelt and his successors...

...For instance, Dennis cut through the mountains of cant piled up by the pro-Hiss and anti-Hiss supporters with: "To jail Alger Hiss, a Carnegie Foundation parlor pink for perjury makes the same sort of sense that jailing Al Capone on an income tax evasion charge made...