On the American Cultural Front
On the American Cultural Front Louis Fischer Writes of Men and Politics And Forgets "to Retrieve His Past" By Eugene Lyons EDITOR OF THE AMERICAN MERCURY THERE is no longer anything remarkable...
...but it is not intellectual refinement wbich is in question...
...Russia—the direction in which it was being dragged by its ruthless bosses...
...In these ten or twelve years, and especially since the Hitler-Stalin nuptials in August, 1939, it has become a rather familiar behavior pattern...
...His failure to recognize bankruptcy for fourteen years is as much a reco:d as his delay in announcing it...
...But somehow it does not occur to him to apologize to those whom he had duped, whatever his noble intentions, or even to attempt a rational explanation of the prolonged reporting of "black Moscow" in such pretty red tints...
...Yet he disdained squeamishly to put fingers into a 'typewriter to enlighten those who looked to him for guidance...
...For years he left them to suppose that he was still among the court scribes of the faithful when he had, in fact, .been sickened by the Kremlin's sanguinary work's...
...Hitlerism has created a new hierarchy in human society in which the warrior is put first and the intellectual last...
...German intellectuals were by no means steadfast opponents of Hitler...
...By indirection and in casual references, as I have indicated, he acknowledges fulsomely that the crimes and betrayals pre-date 1936, the year of his Great Decision, the year when passion for truth catapulted him magnificently into self-abnegating silence...
...intellectual search is blind outside of mass movement...
...When the Stalin Constitution was announced for the edification of innocents abroad, Fischer hailed it in both The Nation and Current History as a munificent "abdication" by the Stalin dictatorship and the beginning of a blessed era of democracy and justice...
...But their strength becomes really effective in the very junction with intellectual moving forces...
...in more than the slang sense, the stage is broadminded...
...Year after year he had helped dope them with false hopes and alibis for mass slaughter, and now he wants credit for not waking them rudely from their sweet narcotic dreams...
...Nevertheless, I doubt whether his customers ¦ ever suspected, on the basis of Fischer dispatches, that this Stalin "is an animal of prey which first paws its victim to feel out its strength, then strikes to cripple and steps back to watch the effect and finally kills...
...Motion, pictures andPtturfesque :shows we need not count...
...Ernest Hamburger, noted German scholar, is part of a discussion on the War and its impact on the Intellectuals which has been the subject of letters and articles in The New Leader in recent weeks...
...Objectively;- of course, his book is a confession that for fourteen years he had misjudged the Russian Revolution and that for more than seventeen years he has misled his readers and lecture audiences on the fundamentals of Russian trends and realities...
...Ralph Bates has written that for him it all ended at the Finnish station...
...His pages are filled with casual references to horrors which he had in previous years palmed off on Nation and Town Hall innocents as noble proletarian victories...
...What needs noting, as a new clinical case is laid before us, is merely the manner of the man's retreat from the Kremlin...
...but unfortunately we were taught by events that the minds of an intellectually uncor-rupted, young and fresh people did not constitute any more a promising weapon against the deadliest threat to the modern world civilization...
...As long as men care to contemplate themseWes, as long as they seek to understand and improve themselves and the world they live in, the stage will continue (as its greatest artist declared) to hold the mirror up to nature, to feel—and to quicken—the pulse of the human heart...
...In this present book he does not even mention that little affair of the famine and his^own reporting of it under aegis of his passion for truth...
...Has he owned up to past political and intellectual skullduggery', and dared to look squarely into the mirror of his own mind...
...French intellectual life and democratic thought, confused in a world whose institutions did not'function in harmony with its underlying ideas, again will play their traditional and brilliant role in the reconstruction of a free community of nations...
...It is a vast industrial organization and a big educational institution...
...In a volume demonstrating that he failed to see truths close..to the surface of Soviet affairs, he still boasts of his industry in digging under the surface in villages and factories...
...It was, I submit, a most inopportune time to send his passion for truth on a three or four years' holiday...
...I did not protest immediately against Willi Schlamm's doubtful comparison of the French and the Yugoslav attitude...
...Year after year he had served them with such pas-uonate Snd uncritical abandon, that—as he records himself on page 208 of his book—he was widely accused of being "a Soviet agent...
...He owed them a clear reappraisal of Russia, past as well as present, and a courageous reappraisal of bis personal role in Russia...
...Events have served as ¦ a stronger critic of Schlamm's thesis than any article} could have done...
...IT is perhaps not easy to locate the weak elements in the * construction of European society collapsing under Hitler's policy and the strategy of Nazism...
...and formulas of concealment as a true vision of "victorious socialism" in Stalin's land of the Piatiletkds...
...ft?Eseher"s opportunity was to understand and fcslyie his own prolonged intellectual servitude ¦what he now condemns as black and horrible ^tatorship...
...it is broad-shouldered — heaving and hearty and alive...
...Fagin declares that New York can no longer hold its place as the cultural center of the country...
...A LL of this if we take him at his word -that **, he kept mum on the arials...
...It was in 1936, when the tide of blood began to engulf his closest personal associates among the Soviet officials...
...Fagin is not, therefore, lamenting the...
...In the field of comedy, there are three distinct and refreshing novelties, "Arsenic and Old Lace," "Pal Joey," and "Lady in the Dark...
...There had been mass liquidations, show trials, man-made famines, suppressions of the last vestige of trade unionism, expunging of all civil and human rights before that—only he had then been better able to "take it," and to translate it all into the double-talk of Leninist firmness and Soviet "achievements...
...Now he states, just like that, as if he had known it all along, that it was all a fraud and marked,-instead, a new era of reaction and official murder...
...Besides, I do not share Schlamm's opinion that intellectuals in Germany were the easiest prey to the Nazis...
...unfortunately it has been betrayed all along 'by a certain moral sloppiness...
...Things were happening which made me sick and kept my fingers out of the typewriter.*' JDne anight suppose from this that sickening things had not been happening earlier, bnt many pages 'of his own book are proof to the contrary...
...So he waited...
...At least', so it seems to Bryllron Fagin, who visited the_ decrepit lane (kept alive with neon gas) last Christmas, and who last week prepared its epitaph in The New Leader...
...given by himself in this book...
...I never approved of the big Stalin purge," he claims...
...Hitler is defeating a continent through .the use of machinery superior to any other, and because of an "unrefined," barbarian-, rr/ind which has been more determined in action than an old «.plit-up society, and the terrorized peoples of that continent...
...Aside from what this means in terms of his mental integrity, it was exceedingly unfair to his Nation public...
...he is really showing that the - ground is richly sprouting for its rebirth...
...World War I was an eruption within a stable system of states...
...Unfortunately be did write two words—Louis Fischer'—in tangential but unmistakable approval of those trials, along with Corliss Lamont, Maxwell Stewart and other defenders of the blood-retting...
...Republic and Town Hall breeds who had accepted his cumulative self-delusions •JffiV AND POLITICS, ly Louis Fischer...
...These shortcomings indeed played an important and disastrous part in the failures of Democracy in the last decade...
...And 'in our own time the East-West Players, the Washington Square Players (who grew to be the Theatre Guild), the Provincetown, and many more, stimulated and brought fresh life to the professional theatre at its best...
...It reminds me irreverently of the fabled Scotchman who kept quiet when his wife fell out of the airplane...
...Three years longer, therefore, he waited for a dividend...
...The dreadful dangers of lack of intellectual self-discipline, or of the destruction of ideas by intellectual amorality or aimlessness, is not inherent in intellectualism as Schlamm seems to beMeve...
...We are forced to the conclusion that he was playing a political game—at the expense of credulous leaders—and that he continued to play the game long after he had lest all faith in it...
...He waited, indeed, until Stalin openly made common cause with Hitler and even the innocents had begun to suspect that there was something rotten in Utopia...
...More serious dramas have been less abundant—as it to be expected, m tense and waiting times—but it cannot be called an empty season in which one could see Sherwood's "There Shall Be No Night" (Pulitzer Prize), Anderson's "Journey to Jerusalem," Rice's "Flight to the West," Saroyan's "The Beautiful People," Hellman's "Watch on the Rhine" (N...
...IT seems to me that our minds do not follow with sufficient * speed the scorching course of contemporary history...
...Fischer has a good mind, well stocked with facts...
...It is true that Fischer allowed himself, in the years of his servituds^a few mild words of chiding of Stalin's abnormal appetite for adulation...
...While there has always been a large body of "escape" plays—we used to say plays for "the tired business man," and there will always pop up some biased cry for extreme actionjjn violent form like "The Native Son," we can also be sure that the point of view of the forward-looking and socially concerned will have its rich expression in the drama...
...Has he cleansed his soul of the deception' and machiavellism to which, as a Stalinist,- he bad been committed by definition...
...not by a more barbaric mind, for in this respect Hitler is un<matchable, but by the taking alcng with us, the intellectually educated men and women for action towards a world-wide organisation of peace and democracy...
...He has been altogether too skillful in rationalizing in the direction of his own emotional comfort...
...Through amateur groups, through new agencies like the Federal Theatre (which themselves may die) it learns fresh ways of growth...
...Those suspicion...
...tJOW many of those -who read his books and *^ articles, even unto late 1939, suspected that Fischer always hated the G.P.U...
...Today both collapsed under German pressure in a few days...
...Herman Shumlin, who has produced both this and "The Com Is Green," may soon fall from favor...
...Did he break clean...
...By his silence, to put the matter honestly* he.' was fooling those to whom he had become a monitor and a mentor...
...Dewey's undertaking in advance...
...Fischer was one of the signatories...
...By Dr...
...VSiF the current season on Broadway, there >T is much good to say...
...Of why he refused to mourn for the victims of the unspeakable valuta tortures—even though a relative of his own was among them...
...The current revival of Bernard Shaw's "The Doctor's Dilemma" adds to the newer plays I have mentioned testimony that keenly critical minds are alert, as feeling hearts are ready, to discuss the timely and the eternal problems, in terms of drama...
...Now he...
...Hamburgers's discussion is two columns by Willi Schlamm in The New Leader of April 12 and 26 wherein Schlamm attacked the intellectuals for being an easier prey to totalitarian vogues and fashion than the Balkan peasantry...
...From 1922 to 1936 Fischer dug and probed and investigated and by 1941...
...that the trials of the Old Bolsheviks grew directly out of the trials of the Mensheviks and engineers...
...I»do not deny that the world owes fruitful results to thinkers and political fighters who have followed this path...
...It has always been a cherished idea of disappointed and romantic intellectuals to go back to the uncorrupted people and to draw from them new strength...
...indeed, it looks now as though it may for some time be the cultural center of the world—until, shall we say, it is superseded by Berlin...
...Y. Critics' Circle 'Award), "The Corn Is Green...
...Men and Politics can stand as a tombstone on its grave...
...Equally alive, though of more questionable value, were the stirrings of those that sought to use the theatre as a vehicle for tightening the Communist party line around the necks of the unsuspecting...
...tells these people blandly that he deliberately steered around the unpleasant subject and even boasts in effect, "Now, wasn't that brave and considerate of me, comrades...
...is not merely an intelligence service and militia...
...his balmiest days as virtual press agent for Kremlin policies...
...She made it, merely—but that's a great deal—the story of a man fighting the (Nazis, through whoim there is an American family "suddenly awakened to the danger threatening its liberty...
...I do not believe we have anything to learn from this philosophy...
...Here are the facts: On ' February 9. 1937, when the flood of Bolshevik blood was at high tide, the Daily Worker published the text of a vicious and utterly specious attack on Prof...
...I did not write a word aibout the ' Moscow trials of leading Bolsheviks...
...He had a matchless opportunity to retrieve bis put by facing it...
...He knows well enough that the horrors he now denounces are direct progeny of the horrors he so recently defended...
...Which means, until current culture has died...
...I could go on, but space and patience are giving out...
...and apart from Britain, there has been no greater glory anywhere in this Civil War World, begun in 1935, than in the proud fight <jf republican Spaniards led by intellectuals...
...simple and unmystic political crimes and sadisms...
...I have made a hobby of collecting pretty euphemisms for Stalinist horrors, and this by Fischer about the G.P.U...
...But subjectively he remains smugly self-righteous, as in...
...In the fact of this record— and it is typical of page after page of slurring over his unsavory part in the befuddlement of liberal opinion—he does net scruple to write, several times in different variants: "Truth with me is a passion, and I do not hold that cause is worth much if it must live on lies...
...Not a month or a year but more than three years—while the rest of his friends and heroes were rounded up, tortured, exiled and murdered...
...But, of course, Manhattan can continue to be one of the cultural centers of the U. S...
...Social Democratic policy is based upon a well-balanced union of both...
...Surely he knew at least that much in 1936, when he went overboard in praise of that scrap of paper...
...But nowhere in the book does he face boldly his own behavior before that epic revolution inside Fischer...
...He had probably been closer to the Bolsheviks than any other American miter, in or out of the Communist Party...
...while the rest of his delusions on Russia were "completely" drowned in blood...
...No such thing is offered in Fischer's so-called autobiography, Men- and Politics.* His need, to justify himself blotted out his natural instinct to ''tell all," which breaks through only, in moments of rhetorical abandon...
...Fischer, as he says, "had invested fourteen years of hope in Soviet Russia" and was safeguarding his investment...
...He will be defeated by the creation of weapons superior to his, and by a new conception and community of democratic thought...
...However fffrs we may be from that goal, we should not disregard or discredit the intellectual fa<?tor which is indispensable in a dptiocratic victory over Hitler and necessary in gaining superiority over the National Socialist concept of a totalitarian world...
...The direction in which the Soviet regime was rolling downhijl was too obvious for anyone as clever as Fischer to miss utterly...
...Insofar as he has failed to face his biography and straighten out his relations with his customers and his conscience, he is still playing that game...
...death of ^Broadway...
...As for the college dramatic societies and other amateur groups, by praising these Mr...
...In our-Revo-lutionary days, amateur performers (Nathan Hale was a good one) and college players prepared the way for professional companies...
...That ungodly delay should be viewed through the eyes of American liberals whw were, during the moratorium on truth-telling, still counting Fischer among their most solid pillars, supporting the elaborate myth of a happy, democratic, Socialist and peace-loving Russia...
...Odd how far, in name at least, these groups extend...
...with few honorable exceptions, they hastened to assimilate themselves after Hitler's rise to power, but they were not among those who in the years of the Weimar Republic led the march towards Hitlerism...
...Harry Ward pawed desperately for new and hidden "motivations" in Soviet life to explain the unhidden miseries...
...Fagin is holding out the greatest promise to Broadway...
...Native Son," and a uniquely warped figure is offered as a symbol of his oppressed race.' • • * • ?F we may glance for a moment at what's * "left" in Broadway criticism^ we find the New Masses and the Daily Worker raising high praise for Blitzstein's abortive blitzkrieg on opera, "No for an Answer," as feeble a piece, in both idea and music, as we pray we may never have to see again...
...Vincent Sheean dates it by the Stalin-Hitler pact Some of the current fellow-travelers are waiting patiently for Stalin's betrayal of China or Turkey...
...We need not worry...
...It becomes no less dangerous when it is spread through the ambiguous expressions of an honest and gifted writer who, in my opinion, wants only to warn us against intellectual cynicism, the, overestimation of intelligence and the underrating of will—and who is quite right in his emphasis of these points...
...the present violent international struggle, however, is a fight for the restabilization of a revolutionized world, and for tha^ adjustment of an era thrown out of joint...
...For seventeen years he had "watched this pathological animal of prey without confiding in his lecture . and magazine audiences—and now adds insult to the injury by failing to explain or apologize...
...Through the Dark Ages it was the colleges that kept the drama alive, until the Church allowed it to slip through...
...of seeking recondite and mystic excuses for...
...of the second nighters •TWENTY-ONE plays, srx of them musical, ¦ offer their various ware^juj thet'gay White Way...
...Meet the People"—and you behold misguided talent in a composite imitation of "Hellzapoppin" and "Pins and Needles...
...Those American liberals of the The Sation, New...
...they are aljSrther sign that Broadway is dying...
...Their titles, like Jesus' love, are all-embracing...
...Neither could they guess that this Stalin indulges "a relentlessness and pettiness which are epic, and pathological...
...Mr...
...had special reasons for...
...Such panicky digging, I happen tj Iknow, is one way of avoiding the obvious truths...
...There is a point at which the toughest gtcmach turns, the most complacent conscience is revolted...
...It Is no irrelevant accident that calls our theatre Broadway...
...MOW it develops that through all these years "if service to the Kremlin, while being presented to his American readers and audiences as a; "neutral" if friendly observer, he had really detested the terror and mourned for the aijfferings of the Russian population...
...P IS CHER indicates specifically the point at . . which his stomach was turned...
...lir...
...The "American Writers Congress"—ignored or repudiated by most of the worth-while writers...
...But nary an explanation of why he refused so demonstratively to mourn for them earlier, when they were being liquidated and starved and tortured...
...For he derides those that call him a Communist, and he now refers to his refusal to permit his companies to give benefits for Finland as an "emotional error...
...It needs, indeed, as severe a control as is needed in every other field where freedom may be abused...
...their evident purpose was to raise n bad odor around Prof...
...Against the-elaborate record of his cumulative errors, he still "postures as a "profound" student of Soviet and revolutionary affairs...
...Abuse and misuse—even temporary disuse— cannot daunt its perennial vitality...
...expecting a straightforward explanation...
...The change, after all, was not in Russia but in Fischer...
...And even if he learned it later,, why did he wait so many years to take his friends of The Nation into* the secret...
...The bad plays*;1 at least, died more quickly...
...American liberalism, in the years when men like Fischer were thoroughly Stalinist, was killed by an overdose of Kremlinesque niachiavellianism...
...They could only accept 'his silence, coming after nearly a lifetime of hosannahs for everything out of Russia and coupled' with his notorious cooperation at that very moment with the Stalinist wing of the Loyalist cause in Spain, as- an authentic Fischer imprimatur* on the horrors...
...Small wonder \ that all the boys who went through the same . slow-motion experience—Hindus, Schuman, Joe Barnes et al—hail his book as a masterpiece...
...Fischer presents detailed proofs that he was -tragically mistaken in his judgments on the most important fact about...
...Both papers, on the other hand, scold Lillian Hellman, because in "Watch on the Rhine" she refrained from making the hero a Communist...
...How could it...
...they evidently admire the tempo of his political intelligence...
...One of the plays Professor Fagin may have missed, a season or so back, was "The Fabulous Invalid," a retrospect of the theatre that showed it forever dying—and thus eternal...
...The Constitution of 1936," says he, "did nothing to curb the dictator...
...with offhand descriptions of odious personalities around a "pathological" dictator as perverted monsters, though he had formerly glorified them as Bolshevik supermen...
...he points to 65,000 (isnt there • an extra 0?) producing groups throughout the , land, as signs of the fertility of the dramatic field outside the city...
...INTELLECTUAL education of the mass is as important as * education of ist representatives to a forceful and moving will...
...Having turned, however, he did exactly nothing about it: "I preferred to wait before I condemned, at least until I got completely fed up...
...In the spiritual sense at least, Broadway is coming out of the red...
...When finally he decided to mouin, the urge was so overwhelming that it took his sobs only three and a half years to ^urst the barriers of his political discretion...
...The "American Negro Theatre," with performances weekends irr a library on 135th Street...
...Nor do I deny the enormous moral and political importance of popular forces, for any policy which leaves them out of consideration rs condemned to sterility...
...The "American Youth Theatre," running for three nights jn a hotel auditorium...
...He prefers to solace himself and his friends with the childish fairy tale that everything was lovely until 1936, with dictatorships gaily abdicating, Yagoda torturing only class enemies, and Stalin crippling and killing only traitors...
...He indicates' coyly that in the long course of his mistaken journey he served as guide and mentor to the American victims of the cult of Russia-worship...
...Hitler had at his disposal a scanty group of intellectuals, but the huge majority strod against him when he had already won the youth and the millions from the middle-class, the peasantry, artisans, merchants and white-collar employees...
...emerges with the startling discovery that Russia is a dictatorship...
...It Is amazing that even in his second article about this problem, despite the historic lesson given by the facts, Schlamm insists upon his idea...
...Turn now to page 106 of Fischer in an earlier incarnation: his Soviet Journey, published in 1935, and read: . "The G.P.U...
...He does not attempt * to square this passion with his private record, even insofar as it is...
...The immediate springboard for Dr...
...But we need to defend ourselves against wrong or exaggerated deductions from these facts...
...He wrote it...
...This magnificent self-restraint need not be put dowrr wholly to stoicism...
...Soviet developments tormented me," he writes of this turning point...
...Those were years when the Soviet purges, trials and a new Constitution were touchstones of the Stalinist faith in America...
...Insofar as Louis Fischer is concerned, the answer to all such questions is in the negative...
...If this does not constitute a breach of his nobleN si lence—and a breach, alas, on the side of the G.P.U.—then his "out" is a highly technical ancfunheroic one...
...Broadway's Theatre Alive in Its Reflection of World Problems By Joseph T. Shipley president...
...Not to mention the continuing "Life With Father," and the now "positively" closing "Tobacco Road...
...Because I have learned to love them (the Russian people), I mourn all the more their prolonged and deep suffering...
...Long after he had broken with Stalin in his heart, he was thus playing with him in public...
...The revolt of masses is disastrous without intellectual power...
...A quarter of a century ago the French were refined and the Serbs unrefined, and yet both made immeasurable sacrifices, resisted bravely Tand died...
...that the bargain with Hitlerism was not a sudden lapse hut a logical climax to that whole process oi* deepening totalitarianism which he so passionately hailed as victorious Socialism...
...John Dewey and those joined with him in an independent efTort to get some truth on the trials.' The signatories to that amazing document have gone down in left-wing history as "the stfnkers' committee...
...How does he explain the fact that his readers remained so long in high-minded ignorance of the great famine of 1932-33...
...Ernest Hamburger Current Vogue of Anti-Intelledualism and jCvnicism Weakens Fieht on Nazi Theories The following article by Dr...
...Of course, cynicism does precipitate a downfall under the blows of a barbarian invader supported by the most highly developed technical equipment, and intellectual-ism alone does not prevent, it...
...Whatever his motives, he had identified himself so inti- -mately with the rulers of the tormented Russian ' nation that even Chicherin [first Soviet foreign* minister]—again by Fischer's own testimony, on page 145—accused him in 1930 of "speaking like a. Stalinist" in a book on Soviet foreign affairs...
...Not until 1935 did he come around to using the naughty word famine about the millionfold slaughter, and then in a context which neatly obscured the whole atrocity...
...This "dating" of evil is an old trick of intellectual sleight-of-hand...
...How' many guessed that this hatred was shared by the whole Soviet people...
...It does not discredit it as such...
...Of Henry Yagoda, who reigned over endless terror precisely in the years when Fischer was the foremost hymn-singer to the Soviet regime, he now writes: ~ "During the years he had tortured Russia as head of the G.P.U., Yagoda executed, exiled and arrested millions *<tf men, women and children...
...He now boasts of this breath-tak'ing daring...
...In just such a time we must all the more carefully' examine the inherited and the new moral and material -values, preserving those which may be of help in building a world of the future, according to our ideals...
...Uneven as this group may be, it is undeniably provocative, rousing, alive...
...is my prize item...
...Dull, Sloan and Pearce...
...and its works...
...On the American Cultural Front Louis Fischer Writes of Men and Politics And Forgets "to Retrieve His Past" By Eugene Lyons EDITOR OF THE AMERICAN MERCURY THERE is no longer anything remarkable or newsworthy about another American intellectual's break with Stalin's corpse-encumbered tyranny...
...were so widespread in Moscow, itself, in the foreign colony, in the years when I Ured there, that conversation instantly became guarded when" he arrived among us...
...Hindus regularly rummaged in the dung of his native village for justifications of horrors he could not avoid seeing in Moscow...
...These are the facts as now told in Men and Politics, with a gesture of pride in his seventeen years of self-sacrificing concealment...
Vol. 24 • May 1941 • No. 22
