THE EARLY FIFTIES: ANOTHER LOOK
Connolly, Peter M.
Different parts of the past are "alive" at different moments in the present. We are now witnessing an extraordinary upsurge of interest in the period that might be said to have begun with the...
...To have been a Communist is to have been guilty of something...
...Liberal anti-Communists now profess distaste for the congressional inquisitors and loyalty vigilantes of the early '50s...
...Hilton Kramer draws a sharp distinction between justified sympathy for the "innocent" people who were "smeared and even destroyed by false accusations" and the Communists who "denied their true commitments and beliefs and thereby created an atmosphere of havoc and hazard for the truly innocent...
...However intensely one may believe that American Communism was a moral and intellectual disaster, it must be acknowledged that history presents some American Communists of the early '50s as martyrs to their beliefs...
...Toward victimizers and victimized, they adopt a "plague on both your houses" stance...
...At present, this position generally leads to a grudging willingness to defend what occurred, at least as regards those adjudged not to be "innocent...
...The overwhelming majority of those Americans who were persecuted ruthlessly by the government and by amateur witch-hunters during the McCarthy era never spied for the Soviet Union, never made bombs, plotted assassinations, or did anything else violent or legitimately denominated illegal...
...They accept Sidney Hook's formulation that Communists and fellowtravelers were not socially desirable "heretics" but malevolent "conspirators" in the service of a hostile foreign power...
...This authoritarian tinge in various elements of the antiwar movement helped to unite most Americans in hostility to it and thus to prolong the unconscionable American intervention in Vietnam...
...There duly emerged an updated version of fellowtraveling in that movement, with sentimental views of North Vietnam, Cuba, etc., replacing the former false picture of the Soviet Union...
...To argue that those who were victimized thought foolish thoughts, engaged in unfair polemics, or participated in power struggles in left-wing organizations and labor unions, and thereby to imply that this in some measure counterbalances the enormity of what was done to them, is truly to experience a failure of the historical imagination...
...To them, it is still an article of faith that if one became a "knowing" member of the Communist party one's beliefs and actions became a proper object of governmental concern...
...These men argue that American postwar resistance to Soviet totalitarianism was morally warranted...
...The two most logical outgrowths of the policies of Truman and Acheson are the twin disasters of Vietnam and Watergate, the one representing the culmination of Cold War paranoia about Communism and the other the fulfillment of the potential for power abuse inherent in the "national security state...
...The unreconstructed anti-Communist liberal position has been forcefully stated in Nathan Glazer's "An Answer to Lillian Hellman" (Commentary, June 1976) and Hilton Kramer's "The Blacklist and the Cold War" (New York Times, October 3, 1976...
...As to what actually happened to American Communists and alleged fellow travelers they are silent or regard the issue as minor...
...Liberal anti-Communists appear to resent the idea" of a Communist or fellow-traveler as victim and have no patience with those who represent them artistically as such...
...It must constantly be kept in focus that during the early '50s people were made to suffer for thinking thoughts and saying words that were unpopular...
...The radicals, who had exercised a leavening influence in the labor E9161 movement, the arts, and other "advanced" sectors of American politics, were driven to the periphery of American life...
...It is a sign of the times that Carl Bernstein, upon resigning from the Washington Post, forswore the raking of presentday muck and announced an intention to write about the blacklist...
...The Korean War, the arms race, and the Vietnam War all grew out of the antiCommunist mania of this period, a mania largely generated by the misrepresentations of Russian postwar aims made by the Cold War liberals who are the main villains of the era...
...On the left, the renewed debate over the Truman loyalty program, HUAC, the blacklists, the Hiss case, the Rosenbergs, McCarthy, and the other obsessions of that time have revealed the existence of two distinct attitudes regarding the early '50s, which can roughly be characterized as revisionist and anti-Communist liberal...
...policy in Indochina, it had no widespread tradition of radical antitotalitarianism to rely on in formulating its attitude toward Communism...
...The permanent war economy was institutionalized, with evil consequences at home and abroad...
...Basic to this position is the belief that what happened to the American Communists and those within the party's orbit was wrong...
...I WOULD LIKE to sketch out an alternative position, one that might commend itself to those on the left who find themselves in neither camp...
...Anti-Communist liberals remain intensely conscious of the issue of how a free society should respond to those seen as using democratic means to effect undemocratic ends...
...Isn't that harm enough...
...Or are there any anti-Communist liberals still prepared to contend that the American Communist party and those it influenced posed any kind of real "threat," justifying obsessive governmental and private attention, to the most powerful nation on earth...
...They and like-minded liberals believe that Americans who sympathized with Soviet Communism were in league with atrocity and mired in intellectual bad faith...
...We are now witnessing an extraordinary upsurge of interest in the period that might be said to have begun with the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and ended with the Senate condemnation of McCarthy in 1954, which I shall refer to as the early '50s...
...Though there too the climate of hysteria took its toll...
...In retrospect, their absolute right to their opinions must be zealously defended by anyone who cares about human rights and does not wish to reserve his compassion for those with whom he identifies...
...When the militant antiwar movement arose in justified horror at U.S...
...While donning the libertarian mantle at home, they assert, Communist and fellow-traveling intellectuals offered "sophisticated" explanations for the absence of liberty abroad...
...I would add one other point to Howe's catalogue of disastrous results...
...Assuming, for the sake of argument, the Rosenbergs' guilt, would anyone today defend the death sentence passed on them or agree with President Eisenhower and Judge Kaufman that they bore the main responsibility for the Korean War...
...It is never clear what...
...If any of these things were done, then it was just to punish those responsible in the normal course of the criminal law...
...Different parts of the past are "alive" at different moments in the present...
...The revisionist attitude can be schematically but not unfairly represented as follows: The early '50s constitute a tragic era...
...Irving Howe has written of Lillian Hellman's contention that "whatever our mistakes, I do not believe that we did our country any harm": Dear Lillian Hellman, you could not be more mistaken...
...Having said and emphasized this, one can then say that at least part of the American left failed to recognize and condemn the evils of Stalinism, and that this failure had disastrous consequences...
...Thousands of blameless lives were ruined...
...Gus Hall may well have cherished dreams of being the American Ulbricht, but the government never proved anything against him and his fellow Smith Act defendants other than that they had a high opinion of the works of Lenin...
...Those who supported Stalinism and its political enterprises, either here or abroad, helped befoul the cultural atmosphere, helped bring totalitarian methods into trade unions, helped destroy whatever possibilities there might have been for the resurgence of serious radicalism in America...
...What many liberal anti-Communists often forgot during the early '50s and evidently still cannot understand is that American citizens have as much right to be Communists as they have to be born-again Bap tists...
Vol. 24 • September 1977 • No. 4
