RED SAILS AND LIBERAL SEAS
Flaherty, Francis J.
BOOKS RED SAILS AND LIBERAL SEAS FRANCIS J. FLAHERTY Concerned About The Planet" The Beporter Magazi~ a#d American Liberalism, 1949-1968 MARTI,N K. DOUDNA Greenwood Press, $14.95 [197...
...Like all passions, their Communism was, at first, euphoric...
...Max Ascoli, an ebullient Italian 6migr6 given to such malapropisms as '"I want you to go through this with a fine-tooth brush," founded The Reporter in 1949...
...Gornick is recounting the sad human fact that people can become the slaves of ideas...
...One member, recalling a Party meeting immediately after Khrushchev's Stalin speech, captured this inartict~late despair: "Like dogs, we wanted to talk, but all we could do was bark...
...4 August 1978:504...
...Unfortunately, her detached and rational style does not convey the texture of this irrational era...
...R~ssia, governed by a mass murderer, was brandishing nuclear weapons...
...If McAuliffe's liberals lacked the .moral courage to resist the demagoguery of a man, Gornick's Communists lacked the intellectual courage to resist the demagoguery of an idea...
...During the fifties, when American liberals were anti-McCarthy and anti-Communist, Ascoli and The Reporter were indistinguishable from the mainstream...
...The Union refused to help Jul:ius and Ethel Rosenberg because they were Communists and, fox the same reason, it ousted Elizabeth Gufley ,Flynn--an ACLU founder--from its .board of directors...
...They .became Party automatons, insensible r the primary irony ,that they were dehumanized soldiers in the war against the dehumanizing strictures of capitalism...
...At the same time it bestowed these gi, fts on its members, the CP/USA rigidly proscribed their thinking, hobbled ,them with rigid dogma, and permitted their n0n~political emotions to ,atrophy...
...He opposed the rise of Castro in Cuba...
...Doudna uses The Reporter, and the philosophy of European liberalism with whioh Ascoli invested it, as a lens through which ,to examine the assumptions and inconsistencies 'of postwar American liberalism...
...he denounced Khrushchev...
...The light ~hat illuminated ,their lives eventually blinded .them to its own internal contradictions...
...One former Communist, now seventy-years-old and living in a small Cape Cod village, recalled his discovery of Marxism 'while working in a Chicago slaughterhouse in 1928: "We were on fire with politics...
...Both hooks dismally suggest that neither good intentions, nor personal integrity, nor a democratic tradition, is proof against the dictatorship of a man or an idea...
...But, in every case, there was a shattering of hopes and illusions...
...They all agreed on only two .things: Commonweal: 503 the experience in the CP/USA was the centerpiece of each of their lives and, during the years of their memberships, they were consumed by the Marxist vision...
...Gornick's story is an unsettling one, more unsettling than t.he verification of McCarthy's fantasies of Reds under beds would ever have been...
...Murray forgot ,this vow in 1953, when he dismissed eleven locals from, the CIO for their alleged Communist ties...
...he supported the Vietnam war until 1968...
...The liberals' options shrank in an atmosphere of national hysteria and international tension...
...Some remained until the 1968 Czechoslovakian invasion...
...Others left when Russia invaded Hungary the same year...
...Ascoli was a liberal in the etymological sense of the word...
...In 1947, CIO President Philip Murray vowed, "E~ery man possesses the right to ,practice any damned ,political Fhilosophy he believes in...
...Even the American Civil Liberties Union adapted to the times...
...Time attributed ,the magazine's demise to its ideological consistency in a changing world...
...Doudna examines this and other divergences between The Reporter and American liberalism, with some interesting conclusions' about the latter...
...The CIO, the ACLU, and 'the ADA all forsook their liberal beliefs in varying degrees...
...The liberals of the fifties, nurtured on the reformism and relative security of the thirties, must have been completely disoriented by the radical rightward shiR of the American political spectrum...
...R enlarged their lives, and galvanized them with a sense of historical purpose...
...Liberals in Congress were conspicuously silent ~bout the cavalier attitude toward due process in the House Un-American Activities CommiCtee...
...Liberal "me-too" anti-Communism is well-documented...
...Disillusionment set in at different times...
...McAuliffe's dry and factual account supplies merely information, while the McCarthy Era, about which the facts are well-known, calls loudly for interpretation and empathy...
...He believed in human freedom, and he ardently believed that fascism and communism gravely threatened that freedom...
...McAuliffe's liberals, running full4iR from the Red Scare, trampled on, or neglected to defend, those basic civil liberties they had formerly cherished and championed...
...And the Americans for Democratic Action, the country's preeminent liberal organization, could muster only lukewarm and unsustained opposition to the depredations of Senator McCarthy...
...Unlike Lillian HeUman, many fifties liberals did cut their consciences to ~ ,the fascist fashions of those years...
...This is the sobering lesson both of Mary McAuliffe's book on the liberal acquiescence to McCarthyism, and of Vivian Gornick's wrenching, impressionistic series of interviews with a hundred former members of the American Communist Party...
...In rather wooden and belabored academese, McAuliffe records these and other well-known sins of omission and commission by American liberals...
...Gornick's Communists, mesmerized by a utopian vision, sacrificed their moral and intellectual independence to the .Marxist "Line...
...As American liberals grew softer ,toward Communism, Ascoli hardened in his opposition...
...BOOKS RED SAILS AND LIBERAL SEAS FRANCIS J. FLAHERTY Concerned About The Planet" The Beporter Magazi~ a#d American Liberalism, 1949-1968 MARTI,N K. DOUDNA Greenwood Press, $14.95 [197 pp.] Crisis On The Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947.1954 1V~ARY SPE, RLING Mc~ULIFFE U. o[ Massachusetts, $12.50 [204 pp.] The Romance of American Commanism V~IVIAN GOR, N'ICK Basic Books, $10 [278 pp.] Demagoguery is a constant danger...
...But, as McCarthy and .the Cold War subsided, Ascoli became "liberally conspicuous...
...Human nature ~ares much better in Martin Doudna's delightful history of a man and a magazine...
...It's enough to make one a Hobbesian: civil liberties bang by slender threads in a world full of sharp knives...
...For twenty years, his magazine competed very successfully with the Nation and the New Republic for ..the ear of the American liberal community...
...Her lucid interviews of ex-Communists focus on the human experience of the American Communist Party...
...30,000 members left the Party in 1956, when Khrushohev revealed Stalin's atrocities...
...We talked Marxism day and night . . . . It was air, bread, light, and warmth .to us...
...Reading McAuliffe's book, I k_9 saying to .myself, "Yes, yes, yes, but what was it like...
...But, absent the political theses, the book is a fine biography of an influential postwar figure, and a history of a journal which, at its zenith, was arguably ,the most important liberal publication in America...
...For me, it was so exciting it was almost physical pain . . . . You know, that's the one thing almost all Communists share, the memory of what it was first like to read Marx, like fireworks exploding in your head, and the love you felt for ,the human intell, igence...
...Vivian Gornick is all yin to McAuliffe's yang...
...The liberal response to Senator Joseph McCarthy certainly was a sordid affair...
...Gornick ,talked to sailors, intellectuals, actresses, Bronx Jews, Boston Irish, and Scarsdale WASPs...
...having found that meaning, they held it tenaciously, ignoring all facts and thoughts ~r contradicted the "Line...
...Marxism invested the lives of these men and women with great historical meaning...
...he postwar Pax Americana dissolved soon after R was conceived...
...Communism stilJ subordinated ,the individual to .the state and, as an etymological liberal, Ascoli saw no reason to change his views...
...McCarthy was flirting with fascism...
...One week after Lyndon Johnson, faced with growing discontent over Vietnam, announced his intention not to run for a second full term, Ascoli saw that The Reporter had run its natural course, and he closed down the shop...
Vol. 105 • August 1978 • No. 15
