The Shame of U. S. Liberalism
Howe, Irving
. . . Never before had the fact of being an American brought one so close to humiliation. The sight of Washington in August was enough to make one cringe, so enormous was the upsurge of...
...It seemed an appropriate, if sour, irony that only through the influence of the President, in whom the distrust of mind seemed almost genetic, was the work of the Senate liberals and intellectuals somewhat modified...
...but to no avail...
...And then when Adams read that the association of intellectual liberals declared through its spokesman, a distinguished professor of hisAutumn 1954 • DISSENT • 309 tory at Harvard, that "it took no position" on the idea of "outlaw," he felt a sickening at heart...
...But now, in a political gesture so coarse and transparent that it could not even deceive the mass of electorate it was designed to deceive, liberalism had resigned its moral claim...
...Hardly a voice said clearly and simply: it is a deprivation of liberty...
...The sight of Washington in August was enough to make one cringe, so enormous was the upsurge of elemental stupidity and reasonless passion...
...Even he, who had resigned himself to being an observer, which meant a little to the stance of being a skeptic, found himself rubbing his eyes at this Congressional stampede to prove that each party was as ready as the other to trample the concept of liberty in the name of destroying its Enemy...
...the spectacle of Congress venting an impotent legislative fury upon the Enemy seemed a nightmare, an insanity of force...
...He knew that to "outlaw" the American arm of the Enemy, in itself so withered and wretched, signified nothing but a hidden conviction among the men in power that the Enemy was beyond their reach and perhaps beyond anyone's...
...It was a hopeless task...
...That there was a danger from the Enemy, he was the first to acknowledge...
...And in this regard Adams had to admit a certain irritation at the arguments of those few who cautioned against the new law...
...And from long bitter experience Adams knew how pleased a Congressman felt at uniting his baser political passions with the certain prospect of selfadvancement...
...Never before had he felt that the remaining decencies and verities, which had trickled down from an almost legendary American past, seemed so perilously close to extinction...
...He expected nothing else...
...For while democracy had suffered a blow, liberalism had struck it...
...but of one thing he was now certain: that after August 1954 American liberalism could never again speak, except with the most vulgar of hypocrisies, in the name of either liberty or liberalism...
...In one of those surges of unreasonable hope from which his training in stoicism had not quite freed him, Adams felt that, finally, it would survive...
...In stray moments, when he suffered the delusion that what the Congress had done might be examined with the methods of reason, Adams tried to analyze the claims of those who defended the new law...
...And in an age during which most of what had been done was unmitigated horror, this was no small claim...
...One word kept coursing through his mind and rubbing against his nerves, bringing fever to his very finger-tips...
...The above fragment was discovered in the course of other, quite unrelated research...
...But even Adams, inured as he was to the ways of the world and the ways of Congress, felt himself a little dismayed, a trifle shocked that not one of the liberals in the Senate— neither Douglas, who was reputed to be a scholar, nor Lehman, whom he had taken to be a man of integrity, nor Morse, who had preened himself on being a man of courage—dared, or desired, to mention the simple fact that the law their clever colleague had initiated was not merely absurd but monstrous...
...Liberalism, however, would not...
...Of such stuff were American heroes made in the middle of the twentieth century...
...From the greatest newspaper in the country to most of the voices of "independent opinion," the claim was that the law was inexpedient, that it hindered the all-absorbing struggle against the Enemy, that it duplicated already existing laws of repression...
...The word was, shame...
...Adams knew that this was a troubling age, when certainties were shed with an almost ritual eagerness, and he sympathized with the impulse if not with the manner...
...Nor was he surprised when the ranting demagogue from the Middle West who had kept the country in a constant state of paralyzed hysteria voted for the proposal which the clever Senator Humphrey meant as the great stroke of strategy, if not vindication...
...That there was already sufficient, and more than sufficient, legislation with which to intercept or punish any acts of espionage or sabotage, no one troubled to deny...
...As the creed to which so many of his friends had turned in their gradual loss of belief, liberalism could at least claim negative virtues: there was so much it had not done...
...None would have to fear that a vote which tore so deep a rift 308 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 into the fabric of traditional American liberties would bring him into disfavor at home...
...But the behavior of the Senate during those last lunatic weeks of August, when all petty factions melted into one insensate mass of fear and ignorance, struck him as beyond belief...
...Unable to mobilize itself against the true danger, which was abroad, the government in all its branches had turned with a reckless ferocity to the shadow of that danger, which was at home...
...Yet American democracy might survive the blow...
...Adams felt no surprise when the herd of village lawyers and political mastodons voted for the proposal which the clever Senator Humphrey had sprung at the penultimate moment...
...What purpose then could the new law have but to repress opinion, to hinder the free expression of views so detested that nothing could be a more decisive bar to their success than their free expression...
...Never before had the fact of being an American brought one so close to humiliation...
...He was not even surprised at Humphrey himself, who from the very beginning he had felt—it was a dubious consolation to remember—to be a demagogue too, though a demagogue who had strayed to the side of liberalism...
...310 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954...
...at least not the liberalism of the moment...
...He fought to maintain his philosophical detachment, he told himself that at his age the measure of human folly and deceit need no longer be taken, he reflected upon the assuaging and amending potentialities of time...
...To declare a political party "outlaw"—Adams, ransacking his small store of history, could recall no precedent in Congress—was clearly a danger...
...He had seldom been an admirer of the American political species...
...It had committed moral suicide...
...As he turned wearily to his apartment late in an airless night, when the noises of the city had fallen to a hush and the illusion of peace lay upon the comforting darkness, Adams felt a great wave of nausea suffuse his body...
...The term "conspiracy" had become the cant of the moment, a broad stifling canvas beneath which irrationality spread and repressive impulses flourished...
...He had seldom felt anything but a slight shudder, trained into invisibility, before the average Congressman—and, as he sometimes asked himself with a wry impatience, what other kind of Congressman was there...
...It was written, apparently, shortly after the recent passage of the bill to "outlaw" the American Communist Party...
...As he circled through the streets of Washington during the hot summer days, his mind haunted by voices—for him they were ancestral voices— that had once rung with the hope of a greater freedom and a finer polity, Adams sensed that at least he had lived long enough to witness the end of an epoch...
Vol. 1 • September 1954 • No. 4
