The Post-McCarthy Atmosphere

...With the basic rights proceeding from premises passing of the McCarthyite mood, the which characterize all of America's real threat becomes apparent: not thinking and acting in the era of the merely the hysteria and the insanely cold war...

...in narrow limits, i.e...

...Union membership and dynamite, in the world of the conspiracy doctrine, are both evidence of possible criminality...

...It is assumed that the repression in civil liberties is identical with its more hysterical manifestations, that the recent unpleasantness was a case of "mutual mistrust, recrimination and misunderstanding...

...Masses and the Elite," by E. V. WALTER, and much, much else...

...Thus, when the Senate Committee objected to the malfunctioning of the Attorney General's List, it implied an acceptance of the "principle" of such lists...

...And no one in his right mind the questions and the informers, the will dismiss these victories as meanrevision of constitutional freedoms, ingless...

...Informing, after all, is the traditional method of dealing with criminal rings...

...It will appear...

...It indicated a way of seeing...

...The Attorney General's repeated points of disorder, but the List, the Smith Act trials, the Intern-proper, the well-fed and soft-spoken al Security Act, the Loyalty and Secur-voice of repression, the legitimized ity Programs, the Humphrey Com-institutions of unfreedom...

...It is rather to show that an entire area of exception to the Constitution has been created, and that the theoretical justification of this fact follows from America's way of seeing in the cold war...

...Thus the distinction between the Stalinist espionage apparatus and the legal activities of the Party (not to mention those of radical groups with no espionage or any other apparatus) was blurred, if not obliterated...

...The point of this brief review is not simply to recount how bad things have been...

...It would mean that a more rational and temperate discussion of the internal security problem might become possible than has been possible for several years...

...it must leave Seen in this perspective, it is clear the fundamental basis of the attack that the present relaxation can reon civil liberties intact...

...Theoretically, its major principle is the doctrine of "conspiracy...

...And in Iowa a minister grappled with a townsman and took away his antiCommunist picket sign as the junketeering Russian farm experts came within sight...

...Some readers have written to inquire about articles we announce and then don't print...

...Probably the most important aspect of the Max Shachtman case was not the theory of the "natural right to travel...

...The quasi-criminality of the conspiracy theory was thus contained within a quasi-judicial structure, and the excesses of the star chamber were therefore inevitable and not a matter of administrative error...

...It has cases have been peripheral to the been a time of a coherent institu-basic premises and institutions of the tional development of an attack on repression of civil liberties...

...And yet, until there is some such decisive ruling, the reform of anti-suit of insane assumptions, but given libertarian administration, the calming these assumptions the pattern they of the hysteria, must take place with-develop is rational and calculating...

...ANDRIEUX and LIGNON's essay on factory life...

...For the attack on civil liberties has taken place in an area of governmental bureaucracy, and the denial of liberties has been achieved under administrative rather than judicial procedures...

...The Politics of Psy chological Testing" by JOHN BENNETT...

...The Attorney General's List arbitrarily and ex post facto interdicted a whole series of personal associations...

...America was unable to understand the tremendous power of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism on a world scale and sought plotters rather than social forces...

...During the past few months ex-Senator Harry Cain has defended the Fifth Amendment...

...And when the press cried out at the denial of a commission to Ensign Landy, it did so largely on the grounds that the criterion of guilt by kinship (prolonged association with one's mother) had, in this case, been misapplied...

...It is a coherent, internally consistent articulation of a complex political attitude...

...As a result, the happy notion has been appearing in some circles that the hysteria has passed and the United States is now entering a period of rational reform in the area of civil liberties...

...The conclusion was, of course, that a Communist should not be allowed to teach...

...And in a decade, through the conspiracy doctrine, this point of view has become firmly embedded in the American tradition...

...Already in type for the next issue are: BEN SELIGMAN'S excellent study of the economist Keynes...

...The last portant not to be tricked into a rash decade has not been simply a pathol-optimism...

...And since this testimony was heard before quasi-judicial boards, and not in courts, the normal rules of evidence did not apply...

...Soon the conspiracy theory began to be used with regard to private employment...

...It was rather the judicial assertion of authority over these quasijudicial boards, in this instance the State Department Passport Division...

...But ent relaxation of attacks upon civil even while admitting this, it is imliberties must be placed...

...THE WORLD OF CIVIL LIBERTIES in the last ten years is a strange place of quasi-criminality and quasi-judiciality still theoretically ruled by the Constitution of the United States...

...It was therefore just as logical for Representative Walter to ask an actor about his union affiliation as it would have been to question a known safecracker about the dynamite in his valise...

...As an example of this point, consider the nameless accuser...

...Thus, a basic difference in analysis follows when one sees the last decade as having marked fundamental institutional changes in regard to civil liberties rather than as ten years of gratuitous administrative hysteria...

...All Stalinist activity was conceived of as conspiratorial, mass political movements were thought of in terms more applicable to a paranoid putsch, the epochal occurrence of the colonial revolution was spoken of as if it had been invented by Owen Lattimore and the Institute of Pacific Relations...

...But far more important than the legal theory was the political attitude which the conspiracy doctrine implied...

...Given this starting point, optimism is quite logical and reform is the corollary of the passing of the McCarthyite mood...

...munist Control Act, may be the re-MICHAEL HARRINGTON AND MORE TO COME...

...For many individuals they these too remain...

...Political criteria came into use in various areas of nonsensitive hiring, in television, in the case of union membership, in the matter of fitness to be a member of the Bar...

...What we face, then, is something far deeper than a mood...

...But what is omitted from this analysis is a failure to recognize the profound change with regard to civil liberties which has taken place in the past decade, the fact that any "temperate discussion," any reform, will operate according to a set of premises and within institutions new to American democracy and hostile to civil liberties...

...All on...

...Gradually the general articles are getting printed, and those people who have inquired about the Benno Sarel article, for example, should be patient...

...Because of this, we are confronted with the paradox that an immediate consequence of some of the reforms which may take place will be to legitimize anti-libertarian principles even at the moment that their administration is made more lenient or rational...

...AND there will be a CUMULATIVE INDEX of our first two years of publication...

...The loyalty and security program treated relationships with mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, as proper for governmental scrutiny...

...in Justice Jackson's sweeping concurrence, political conspiracy was placed on the same level as the economic conspiracy enjoined under the anti-trust laws...

...The conspir-store jobs, grant passports, limit the acy doctrine and its inevitable insti-rights of the faceless accuser and so tution, the star chamber, remain...

...As the McCarthyite mood passes, this basic structural transformation should become more apparent...

...The definition developed out of Section 3 of the Smith Act which made it criminal to conspire to advocate at some future date the overthrow of the Government by force and violence...

...The Attorney General's List found its way into personnel offices throughout the nation...

...Basic to this attitude is an implicit, and significant, assumption...

...And in the Peters case there was an interesting revelation in the analysis of why the Supreme Court based its judgment on a technicality: that if Peters' rights had been determined on the basis of the issues which he raised, the loyalty and security program might not have been able to continue to function...

...The formal statement of the conspiracy doctrine was made, of course, in the Eugene Dennis case...

...THE INSTITUTIONAL EXPRESSION of the conspiracy doctrine has been a quasijudicial structure of boards, congressional committees and government agencies...

...The answer is simple: we are heavily stocked with general essays and studies (which is not meant to discourage further contributionsl) and some of them have to be put aside for more topical pieces...

...At times, it all seemed like the Red Skelton skit in which a drunk comes home to a room in which the furniture has been nailed to the ceiling...

...HENRI RABASSIERE'S "The Right to Be Lary...

...Almost all writers agree that major problems remain, but their attitude could be summed up in this statement of John B. Oakes in the New York Times Magazine: if the change of atmosphere indicates that we may be emerging from an era of mutual mistrust, recrimination and misunderstanding, that in itself would be a noteworthy development...

...Presumably, if someone did engage in a "prolonged association" with his "subversive" mother, that would prove him guilty of something...

...Also on hand: an article on Islam by EDOUARD RODITI...

...Juvenile Delinquency and Class Conflict," by GILBERT SHAPIRO...

...Actions which had been afforded the protection of the Constitution now entered into a demimonde of quasi criminality...

...Sidney Hook took a legal doctrine which had begun at three removes from a vaguely defined criminal activity, turned it into a metaphor and discovered an educational conspiracy...

...In Justice Vinson's reinterpretation of the "clear and present danger" test, a legal doctrine of future crime was defined...

...These informers have flourished in all of the Loyalty and Security Programs, Government, Coast Guard, Army, Industrial, etc...

...Once it was assumed that radical political activity was conspiratorial, it was logical that these unsavory figures should come to the fore...

...For almost all of these ogy of unfreedom, a hysteria...

...a Senate Committee has expressed doubts about the workings of the Attorney General's "Subversive List...

...But in the Dorothy Bailey and Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee cases, the Supreme Court refused to come to grips with this problem...

...Here and now, it is important to understand this fact in order to define the limits of the present relaxation of tension...

...This concept is basic to almost every repressive measure, public and private, that has taken place in the last ten years...

...As long as it remains prevalent, antilibertarianism is a logical, inevitable deduction and not a matter of administrative error...

...are a restoration of rights and as such It is in this context that the pres-they are of great importance...

...Given the conspiratorial definition of all Stalinist activity, (and, often enough by inference, all radical activity), it followed that police methods were justified in dealing with distasteful or hateful ideas and an area of exception to the Bill of Rights was created...

...the State Department, in an orgy of issuing passports as an aftermath of the Shachtman decision, has remembered the days of its lost glory only in the case of Paul Robeson...

...Neither, for that matter, did the normal inhibitions upon the Government's right to ask questions—about wives, friends, casual associates...

...Don't miss the Winter issue...