Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR Critics on Right and Left Although Granville Hicks Although Granville Hicks, in his article "The Great Reversal" [The New Leader, March 29], has done me the honor of linking my name...
...If there is any magazine being published in America with a greater span of incompatible assumptions than is behind these three statements, it has not been brought to my attention...
...Lamont rests his case, I am not persuaded that my article was either unscholarly or unfair...
...As I said in my article, "Lamont has never felt obliged to agree with every word that appears in the Daily Worker...
...If I broke with the party, it would automatically follow that I would no longer be an editor of the New Masses...
...Lament's press statement any important issue on which he had differed from the position of the Communist party, it would have been so newsworthy that the New York Times would have reported it...
...I have thought my own way through on the basic problems of our time, following neither Communist line nor the anti-Communist line that now insures social respectability...
...The first sentence is from the article by Granville Hicks: "As things are today, wrong-headed tolerance of Communism is a less substantial evil than wrong-headed intolerance of people Senator McCarthy doesn't like...
...But he agreed with it in repudiating the suggestion that Russia could in any way be held responsible for what happened in Korea...
...Mr...
...Let us rely instead on the decent instincts of our closest companions in the difficult voyage which still faces us, and let us never lose sight of the humility which assures us that we may be wrong...
...Hicks to read mine a little more carefully another time...
...A writer should be judged by his books as a whole, and not by random quotations picked out of the air...
...Since North knew by September 21 that I had sent to the New Republic a statement of my reasons for leaving the Communist party, he could assure Lamont that the report of my resignation from the New Masses was ''substantially true...
...Is it too much to ask Mr...
...This morning, I checked with Joe North by telephone and discovered that the report was substantially true...
...Any man who dares present a train of thought distasteful to these great forces does so at his own risk, and at great hazard to his reputation and means of livelihood...
...It seems to me undeniable that there are many such individuals...
...It was no concern of mine whether he did or did not remain a member of the Communist party...
...In the confusion that followed the Army's "defeat," the cause of the magnified dispute was all but forgotten...
...italics mine) In drawing up his sweeping indictment of me, I should think Mr...
...These myopic souls seem to resent any action designed to unmask the Communist conspirators and their willing or witless aides...
...In 1941, I vigorously supported the constitutional rights of the Trotskyites indicted under the Smith Act...
...Hicks makes his own admission when, referring to my statement released last September summarizing fifty important issues on which I have disagreed with the Communists, he says: "So far as one could learn from the papers, his statement did not mention a single important political issue on which his position has differed from that of the Communist party, nor can I recall a disagreement of that kind...
...The final absurdity is anti-anti-Communist equating of "McCarthy-ism," i.e., vigorous investigation and exposure of Communists and their apologists, with Communism itself...
...New York City Maurice Winograd...
...Hicks would have taken the trouble to obtain a copy of my original statement instead of relying on greatly abbreviated and possibly garbled press reports...
...In such circumstances as we find ourselves, it is worse than useless for us to rely on any direction-finding artificial instruments, "lines," what not...
...He differed with the Daily Worker on the unimportant issue of Anna Louise Strong...
...They are being turned up every day, not only by Government investigators but by private organizations, notably labor unions...
...That, of course, includes all kinds of capitalists, fascists, socialists, radicals and religious sects...
...This sentence was written in the 1880s, but the condition it describes has surely grown worse instead of better in the interim...
...Observation suggests that the number of such publications is not increasing...
...Brookline, Mass...
...It is difficult to escape the conviction that it is not McCarthy, Jenner, Velde and so forth who are their real targets, but investigation itself...
...DEAR EDITOR Critics on Right and Left Although Granville Hicks Although Granville Hicks, in his article "The Great Reversal" [The New Leader, March 29], has done me the honor of linking my name with the names of two men I admire very much, it strikes me that, in his anxiety to prove us all in the wrong, he comes dangerously near to producing one of those "guilt by association" amalgams which I am sure he deplores as much as anyone...
...Hicks really think that it is in the nature of a Fake Liberal, instead of playing it safe by invoking the Fifth Amendment, to make a principled challenge of the McCarthy Committee on the grounds of the First Amendment and the separation of powers...
...After few days of skirmishing, "the Army surrendered"??or so the neo-militarists of the "progressive" press, who fomented the "war," have told us...
...Everything hinges, of course, on what is meant by "important" and what is meant by "difference...
...With a strange lapse of memory, Mr...
...Granville Hicks's "The Great Reversal" is typical of the sort of attacks which confuse the issue and beg the question in the fight against loyalty and security risks in influential positions in and out of Government...
...Since it is on this kind of thing that Mr...
...Ralph Wicker, and on the ensuing feud between McCarthy and Army Secretary Robert Stevens...
...We are told darkly of the "wrong-headed and dangerous ways of fighting Communism," but not told in what way we should prevent the infiltration of Government and the corruption of education, the arts, religion and labor by Red termites...
...Hicks's comment that the quotation from my letter, dated September 21, 1939, referred to his resignation from the New Masses...
...The McCarthy-Army conflict arose over the promotion and subsequent honorable discharge of the Army dentist and alleged Communist, Peeress...
...Is it any wonder that a lot of non-intellectuals (but nevertheless alert and intelligent Americans) are beginning to have (as Hicks suggests) "contempt for the intellectuals as a class...
...They are not concerned about the obvious truth that numerous Protestant clergymen have aided the Communist campaign, wittingly or unwittingly, but only about the fact that J. B. Matthews said so...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...It is precisely because I have stood firm for my principles, and have refused to conform to the "party line" of fanatical anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism, that Granville Hicks joins in the unjust abuse to which I have so long been subjected...
...Does he believe that a Fake Liberal is willing to risk a year in jail by seeking a court test that will place proper limits on Congressional investigations...
...A careful examination of the statement convinces me that the assumption was justified...
...New York City George S. Schuyler Granville Hicks has done excellent work in his day, but in his attempt to portray me as a Fake Liberal ["Liberals: Fake and Retarded," The New Leader, March 22] he has shown neither fairness nor scholarship nor even elementary consistency...
...A hasty reader will get the impression from his article that Max Eastman, Whittaker Chambers and myself are somehow associated with other nefarious individuals ?? including the bogeyman of the hour, that fearful Senator McCarthy??in a conspiracy to oppose "liberalism, rationalism and democratic socialism" and are being very well paid for our pains...
...For more than 20 years, I have been an independent radical and worker for democratic socialism and civil liberties...
...The views which Granville Hicks is putting forward are the views endorsed by the vested interests of the moment and by the aggressive respectability which is their protective reflex...
...This is the first paragraph of that letter: "I was appalled to read in Leonard Lyons's column in the Post yesterday that you were resigning as an editor of the New Masses because of the way the CP press in this country had handled the news of the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact and the Polish business...
...Had he read the original statement, he would have seen that I have disagreed with the Communist party on at least 25 basic political issues, especially in the crucial fields of civil liberties and international relations...
...These anti-anti-Communists seem far more hysterical and fearful than those amorphous multitudes with whom they constantly commiserate...
...This is a rather complicated sentence, but its import would seem to be directly the contrary of the much simpler sentence from a review by James Rorty: "Surely liberty is threatened more by Communism than by McCarthy...
...I resigned as Treasurer of the Progressive party over this very issue of the Korean War...
...Some of us, were it not for magazines like The New Leader, would feel as if our tongues were cut out...
...My many and fundamental disagreements with the Communist party on issues of civil liberties are sufficient in themselves to prove that I have never been a follower of that organization's policies...
...In 1948, I defended the civil liberties of the fascist Father Terminiello, a Catholic priest...
...In the position of true North which we seem to have reached politically, we could not have done otherwise, and anyone who thinks he has is deceiving others or himself...
...I do not care for that weasel word...
...it is pernicious...
...The interesting word in that paragraph is "substantially...
...Westmoreland, Va...
...In 1950, I helped organize a protest to the Soviet Ambassador concerning his government's expulsion of Anna Louise Strong and its outrageous smearing of her as a "spy...
...It is certain bogus "liberals," and not the alleged "witch-hunters," who give comfort to the Communists...
...Hick's effort to expose me as a Fake Liberal, he writes that, in my refusal to answer the McCarthy Committee's questions on constitutional grounds, I was "both right and courageous...
...I do not have the space here to repeat what my press statement said about international relations...
...New York City Corliss Lamont When I wrote my article, I operated on the assumption that if there had been in Mr...
...Then the newspapers took the case off the blotter, so to speak, by making the public concentrate on Senator McCarthy's roughing up of an embarrassed witness, Brig.-Gen...
...Hicks gives a totally misleading impression when he writes: "When I was leaving the party, because of the [Nazi-Soviet] pact, he [Lamont] urged me not to 'take this fateful turn at what has become for a number of people a fundamental parting of the ways.'" You would never guess from Mr...
...I think, furthermore, that any man who tries to think for himself has a right to resent the implication that any critical description of an industrial society which seems to be rushing headlong toward that death in life so beautifully described by George Orwell in 1984 is motivated either by "fear" or by a desire to be "respectable...
...We are told that "from 1917 on, the Communists have been aided by the tactics used against them," but are given no bill of particulars...
...Hicks quotes copiously from my book The Independent Mind, he is so intent on building up a case of Communist fellow-traveling against me that he carefully omits my assertion that the North Koreans' aggression in Korea was a "colossal blunder and act of international immorality" and "the most terrible mistake made by the Communist Left in its entire history...
...Nor is it investigatory "methods" which the champions of pink professors and Red-tainted Fifth Amendment-abusers find so unpalatable...
...Finally, there is the sentence from the speech by Senator Flanders which you reprint as your editorial for the week: "Now is a crisis in the age-long warfare between God and the Devil for the souls of men...
...I am writing you not for the purpose of scolding you for not having a consistent line which compels all of your writers to hew to it on pain of being edited out, but, on the contrary, to praise you for it??and to express my own gratitude as an occasional writer for your pages that I have felt my liberty to say what I like so little curbed by the consciousness of what is expected of me...
...Now does Mr...
...As to sloppy scholarship, Mr...
...They smother with sneers the charge that the principal book-review media have rather consistently praised pro-Communist books while treating with hostility numerous anti-Communist ones, but do not bother to disprove the charge...
...When Lamont says that he was indifferent to my leaving the Communist party but was concerned over my quitting the New Masses??to the point of being "appalled"??he is making a distinction that is quite without meaning...
...Despite Mr...
...And this, contrary to what his letter suggests, was indicated in my article...
...Instead of aiding in this exposure, some of our "intellectuals" are bitterly and persistently campaigning against those who are trying to do so...
...The only issue was whether or not I was going to continue to follow the party line...
...he did not differ with it on the important issue of the Moscow Trials...
...Milton Hindus Sees Peress Case Basic Issue In McCarthy-Army Conflict Whatever became of the case of Major Irving Peress...
...John Dos Passos As one who has never been a member of the Communist party or any of its numerous fronts, I am intrigued by the "intellectual" antics of former Reds and sympathizers now operating on the anti-anti-Communist front...
...But I do wish to point out that, while Mr...
...For instance, I made clear that I always vehemently opposed the limited Communist conception of civil liberties and upheld full freedom of speech for all individuals and groups, from right to left, in the United States...
...The joke is that the shoe is on the other foot...
...Finally, it is necessary for me to say that I do not conceive of myself as any kind of liberal...
...Soon Stevens became "the Army" and McCarthy was said to be fighting the U. S. Army...
...For not only have some liberals, in the words of Granville Hicks, "completely lost their bearings"??we all have done that...
...Your refusal to tamper with what seem to be the most incompatible opinions, coming from people whom you trust and believe to be basically sincere, may be justified by a sentence coming from the Catholic writer Leon Bloy: "Could it be that we are approaching some divine solution, the prodigious proximity of which is sending the needle of the human compass spinning crazily on its axis...
...Lamont's fondness for unimportant differences is excellently illustrated by what he says about the letter he wrote to me on September 21, 1939...
...He differed with it in regard to the question of North Korean guilt...
...This has led them into all sorts of absurdities...
...Enthusiastic when Truman brusquely fired and insulted General MacArthur, they wail over the "mistreatment" of General Zwicker...
...He resigned as treasurer of the Progressive party over the issue of the Korean War, but, in the autumn of 1952, he was the candidate for the United States Senate of the American Labor party, described by the New International Yearbook for 1953 as "the New York State arm of the national Progressive party...
...Grafton, N. Y. Granville Hicks Likes to See Opposing Views In Same Issue of 'New Leader' As usual, I've read the current (March 22) issue of The New Leader from cover to cover, and I've come up with three sentences which illustrate the political range of the magazine...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 17
