The Young Radicals: A Symposium
Solomon, Barbara P.
As there are at least twelve different questions raised by this symposium, all to be answered in four or five pages, I have decided to limit myself to a few ideas. Roughly, there are two...
...For one thing, I was more deeply rooted in my proAmericanism and a sense of national self-interest than I liked to admit...
...Why not ask me what I feel toward an older Communist generation...
...As there are at least twelve different questions raised by this symposium, all to be answered in four or five pages, I have decided to limit myself to a few ideas...
...Despite his mistakes, I feel he is receptive to pulls from the independent left...
...What concerns me are our foreign policies, economic inequalities and deprivations of human rights...
...I am more concerned about this than the current necrophilia of civil defense, which will eventually die of its own absurdity...
...Yet, when I think what would I do if I were President, I know I wouldn't want America to disarm unless adequately protected...
...I know what I feel about the Soviet Union...
...In one breath this symposium hints at "new radicalism," in the other, "new futility...
...The rub, for intellectuals, is to correlate them...
...The silence McCarthy imposed on discussions of Communism is obvious, but it has obscured our own deeper, innate silence—the silence that comes of having been born American...
...My mind drifted off the novel on to the Communist Registration Act, what I had done and not done...
...That this form of political life cannot be Iumped under a specific party label makes it for me no less real, no less valid...
...Until these laws are repealed, until treason again means treason in the real sense of the word, and until we have an above-ground Communist party, political thought left of center will continue to be muddied and evasive...
...I am not used to an Administration which shares my views and I don't expect it...
...What has influenced me is not so much what I thought of the radicals in the thirties—but what I thought of them in the early fifties when so many of them, at the first sign of true "hard times," reacted with such terrible silence...
...But we must be honest in what we demand...
...In order not to be faced with this, our policy must be based on something more genuine than the hand-outs and quickie visits of today...
...Radicals sense this perhaps even more acutely than others, and so we hesitate, going backwards and forwards like Alice's Queen...
...The whole balance of West European democracy would be upset and this could be our worst crisis...
...I remember those who acted with personal dignity, like Mary McCarthy, Arthur Miller, but I also remember the niggling article Murray Kempton, socialist, wrote on Remington's death, the countless demeaning confessions, and the smart-alecky Leslie Fiedlers, the whole mealy-mouthed crowd with their lofty anti-Communism...
...If we think in these terms we have no right to call ourselves political...
...Yet not all foreign political crises are of our making...
...Some are almost geographical...
...America is the only country whose history is not much older than its system of government...
...To imagine another system on our shores is like committing original sin...
...The issue behind the Communist Registration Act is the loss of constitutional liberty —free minds in a marketplace of ideas—and not the fact of Soviet crimes...
...The rub is what will I do, say, ten years from now if most of Latin America has undergone revolutions which may turn out to be morally right from their point of view and yet pose a real military threat from our point of view...
...Of course Communism—its essence, what it could have been—had an enormous impact, yet during my entire adulthood this whole area has remained in the realm of the unspeakable, it has been buried underground...
...America" and "democracy" are words we use interchangeably, and more than anything else, it is our system of government that gives us our identity and binds us to one another...
...This symposium on radical thought asks what I feel for an older socialist generation...
...Even in the privacy of my own mind, I'm not free...
...It is hard for me to separate those liberals who became honestly disillusioned from those who became expediently disillusioned...
...In separating the emotional from the real, democracy is neither our mother nor our Catholic church...
...I feel no compunction about using four letter words, or describing freaks or aberrations, but because there was one moment when I hesitated to show a Communist as a human being, I know I am not free...
...From what I have observed, quite the contrary, it is the European left wing, accustomed to think in terms of possible power, and thus forced to make decisions, that is practical, while the American left wing, in limbo, is reduced to abstraction...
...In fighting against this intolerable law, radicals have been strangely unresponsive...
...The moral "should" the liberals have answered—the practical "how"—I'm not sure...
...Recently, while working on a novel in which one of the characters was a rather sympathetic Communist (not an ex), I paused...
...This symposium asks about Cuba, but that for me is not the real problem...
...For me it is, however, as good a working form of government as any I know...
...One reason is that I am not continually looking at all ideologies with true candor...
...In symposiums I may ponder what it means to be a radical, but in real life, my concern lies with specific issues...
...Roughly, there are two separate themes posed—the individual's private mystique about politics, and his response to day-to-day issues...
...It is very easy for me to join SANE and the peace movements, and with my whole being I yearn for disarmament...
...but how can I honestly say that I am examining all the implications of Communism when I know in advance that I won't accept it...
...Many liberals have begged the question...
...American radicals are forever complaining that American politics, unlike the European, is not sufficiently theoretical...
...In Europe I learned a lot about myself...
...This pressure he cannot create himself—it must come from us...
...how many of us have ever served a prison sentence for our political beliefs...
...However, now that he is in, it is too easy for intellectuals to merely throw up their hands despairing that he is all bad...
...If De Gaullism loses, a right-wing political force will stretch from Algeria through Spain, France and into a God-knows-what kind of Germany...
...In their blurred bitter love for America, they thought they had unwittingly killed the thing they loved...
...We, of the independent left, often have a way of collapsing both after gain and after loss...
...I don't consider myself a radical...
...As I have chosen to live after Hiroshima, after the gas ovens, I am not about to collapse over bad Administration policy concerning Cuba...
...Our morbid fear of Communism is based not only on its threat to our future, but more profoundly, in feeling its capacity to destroy our whole emotional past...
...We demand of liberals in other countries that they storm the barricades and fight until death, but at home...
...I didn't like Kennedy on Cuba before or after his election...
...The most honest theoretical position I can take is to admit that the American theory of political government is, by and large, what I want, and therefore the invention of other theories is not my goal...
...McCarthy was able to point the finger of shame so successfully at a generation because even those who thought they were Communists weren't really clear where they were going...
...Though I was willing to conceive of all sorts of systems for other nations, when it was put to me that maybe America needed another system, my immediate reaction was no—without our government we'd be right back among the Indians...
...I received my own political education backwards—discovering, as a young girl, first European politics during the postwar period, and then coming back to America and discovering what there was of political life in the fifties...
...Politics is a lifetime commitment and one should be prepared for losses and gains...
...Now, after having spent most of my life with disaster around the corner, I find I am more interested in preventing the apocalypse than dwelling on its imminence...
Vol. 9 • April 1962 • No. 2
