'Hard' and 'Soft' Anti-Communism

...It is a quiet and sometimes eloquent book, the attempt of a man who has made peace with himself through absorption in a real community (described several years earlier in his Small Town), rather than in the catharsis of confession, to tell what made him and others a Communist, how he and others discovered its evil face, and to present his troubled thoughts on the inability of people today to see the past in perspective or the present in proportion...

...the most uncompromising of all in his vision of man's weakness, is a neutralist...

...Now all this is forgotten...

...It is true, however (and here it seems to me that Hicks misses the fine edge of the problem), that the official institutions of the cultural community, because of Spain, the threat of Fascism, and the aura of reform, did look with sympathetic eyes on the Communist...

...3.50...

...Some of these men, as Orwell once pointed out in a devastating analysis of Burnham (to be found in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays), slavishly worship power images...

...WRITERS and WRITING 'Hard' and 'Soft' Anti-Communism By Daniel Bell One day early in 1953, Granville Hicks was subpoenaed by the Velde Committee to tell what he knew about Communist activities at Harvard in the year 1938, when he had taught there as a special lecturer...

...Among those who have in recent years been the chief antagonists in the field of education, Sidney Hook, the pragmatist and leading interpreter of John Dewey, has been clearest in his image of Communism: "neo-medievalists" like Stringfellow Barr supported Wallace and the Progressive party...

...For a growing number of persons, Communism is not only a political conspiracy but a variant of the liberal heresy, tied to other sins of materialism, secularism and the like...

...Where others may abstractly link materialism with New Dealism and statism...

...But are they not relevant if one is concerned with political sanity...

...This is the questioning mind of a man who has retained bis balances...

...He came intellectually to Communism in the years after World War I, when disillusionment with Wilsonian idealism ran high and distaste for the money-grubbing businessman, with his triumphant assertion of his brassy values, ran deep...

...Granville Hicks thinks they are, and that is what gives point to his book...

...His emphasis is on people and the sense of communal welfare which has always been an American norm...

...Interestingly, of the neo-orthodox theologians...

...But many anti-Communists who want to flay liberals for their past sins refuse to recognize the dimension of time...

...and its secret strength is the unwillingness of many people??liberals included, but persons like steel magnate Ernest Weir as well??to forego the illusion that the Kremlin wants peace...

...Do not the gross stupidities in administering the new security regulations cripple scientific research more than they flush out Communists...

...This is true regarding their intent and methods, but is it equally true regarding their power...

...There are...

...The test of anti-Communism should be one's willingness to resist Soviet expansionism at all points...

...That it won't admit that domestic Communists constitute a present danger...

...The author of a book on Die Diktatur der Luge ("The Dictatorship of the Lie") applauds McCarthy as a man who is seriously interested in ideas (the Senator's remark about educating Adlai Stevenson with a slippery elm club is presumably a case in point), while an old muckraker of finance has become so obtuse as to deny that McCarthy has ever made use of the lie...

...in the distinction elaborated by William James, the "once-born" and the "twice-horn"??the first who are the "sky-blue moralists...

...But what is the content of this anti-anti-Communism...

...Hence, the anti-Communists felt isolated...

...What is the difference between the Dulles-Eisenhower foreign policy and the Truman-Acheson policy, which stiffened Greece and Turkey and resisted aggression in Korea...

...Bell's monograph on the history of Marxian Socialism in the United States was published in 1952 by the Princeton University Press in the compendium Socialism and American Life...

...On the philosophical level, it is completely anti-Communist...

...Even ADA, whose initial spirit was Reinhold Niebuhr, and whose present co-chairman, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., made slashing attacks on domestic Communists (in Life, among other places) before McCarthy ever spoke up on the subject, is now denounced as "soft...

...We are told, and it is true, that until recently many liberals refused to recognize that Communists constituted a security problem or that planned infiltration existed...

...Is the strength of domestic Communists as great as that of international Communism...

...In the autumn of 1934," says Hicks, "I wrote an article for the New Masses in which I argued that the New York Times Book Review assigned almost all books on Russia to anti-Communists...

...The intellectual community, now centered largely in the universities, is not, of course, Communist or ideologically sympathetic to Communism...

...Communism meant a Utopia, with a patina of revolutionary bravura: for Chambers, it was an apocalyptic vision, drawn from the brooding conviction that the dross of the world would have to be burned off in the purgatory of revolution...

...Hicks's answer tends to be conventional, which does not make it any less true...

...Resentment, as Max Scheler once noted, is probably the most potent political motive in history...

...How explain these contrasting images of the "Red Decade...

...The problem emerges most sharply in the question of the "Red Decade...

...for it is not poverty per se that leads people to revolt??poverty more often instills a sense of fatalism and despair...

...Whatever the corruption of liberalism in the Thirties, whatever the historic flaw in its roseate belief in progress, liberalism has learned humility while those for whom "ex-Communism" is a philosophy of life have not...

...Is there a one-to-one correspondence between attitudes on domestic subversion and on foreign policy...

...Granville Hicks and Whittaker Chambers, both of whom came to Communism at the same lime, represent symbolically the two poles of the appeal...

...If interpreting the Red Decade is a problem, how is one to make sense of the present, when new contrasts create a new oddity...

...There were also, I would say, some other motivations bred deep in the intellectual tradition of the time: a sociological optimism which saw the viability of social control in the power of ideas to shape mores, and a sociological pessimism, observed most acutely by Schumpeter, wherein the expectations for change outstripped the reality (in effect, the failure of the intellectuals to inherit the world which was their due...

...the posture of some is defensively "anti-anti-McCarthy...

...As many sociological studies have observed, it is among skilled industrial workers rather than dispossessed peasantry (viz., Italy), among frustrated intellectuals rather than workers (viz., India) that Communism takes root...

...In what way is one "soft" or "objectively pro-Soviet" if one says that the danger from domestic Communists is small...

...Hicks points out that to be a Communist is to be a potential agent, a soldier in the war against society...

...the second for whom the world is a "double-storied mystery...

...Yet, one significant fact emerges from their bite and scorn, which goes back to the Thirties: their hatred is not so much of the Communist as of "the liberal...

...Yet, much as in our private worlds we wrestle with the question of life's meaning, in the social world, tied as we are in complex ways, no religion can normatively define a particular social structure...

...The Nation book section, under Margaret Marshall, was predominantly anti-Communist...

...The disquieting fact about these apologias is that these men broke with Stalinism on moral grounds...

...And so we are back where we started...

...For the heart of Soviet power is in China, Southeast Asia and Europe...

...There is, however, an implication that is rarely spelled out: that if one is "soft" on domestic Communists, one can't or won't take a "hard" line against international Communism...

...it views with distaste the extreme anti-Communism of the new "hard" intellectual Right...

...but do we not need to see it in its just proportions...

...There were, in all, fourteen faculty Communists at Harvard in 1938...

...What was the reality...

...It is when a fairly mobile society promises opportunities for social and economic betterment, and then cannot fulfill these expectations, that radicalism takes hold...

...Almost all the papers in the country play your stories favorably...

...while the vocal anti-Communists I most of whom, at the time, were close to the Trotskyists or regarded themselves as independent Marxists), with their seemingly quarrelsome manners and their esoteric knowledge of Bolshevik history, appeared extreme and bizarre...

...Oh," he replied, "I wasn't thinking of that...

...What is McCarthy's foreign policy, in fact...

...How explain this reversal...

...We are told that no distinction can be made between international and domestic Communists...

...I would saw is on Hicks's side...

...Although his break with the Communist party in 1939 was an open affair, the newspaper in Troy, New York, near his home, featured the testimony under the blaring headline: "Granville Hicks Admits Past Red Ties Before House Probe...

...But is this really so...

...They regarded him as ultimately wrong, but still as a respectable member of the community...

...but temperament here is more than individual personality, it is a mode of looking at the world shaped by tradition and milieu...

...Yet, as Hicks points out,* somehow it became all-important that this fact be read into the record, not as an example of the slightness of the event but as a telltale sign of infiltration...

...Here, if any single cause has validity...

...He seems to be the person who sets the tone of moderation and respectability in the intellectual community, and this knot of ex-Communists, now as in the Thirties, find themselves outside the pale...

...Who "the liberal" is seems difficult to pin down...

...Is not the real problem in fighting Communism an effective foreign policy...

...Written in the small town of Roxborough...

...To ask these questions is to run the risk, almost, of being called an anti-anti-Communist...

...The myth is a compelling one, and it grows stronger with the repeated revelation of "name" individuals who were fellow-travelers at that time...

...Where Hicks looks at the world's surfaces and tolerantly sees the good and the bad, Chambers, sin-ridden, looks inward and asserts that only a religious view can save us...

...It is this somnambulistic contemporaneity, where political time has lost its dimension, where past conversations, distorted in recollection, become grounds for strange accusations, that gives these days a malefic redolence...

...To that extent...

...By Granville Hicks...

...the McCarthyites, their focus still on intellectual opinion, feel attacked and resentful, and they respond with accusations that the liberals are "soft" on Communism...

...Niebuhr is a liberal, Tillich is still a socialist, while Karl Barth...

...Each side has a different image of power: The intellectual community, with its mind set on McCarthy, feels that the whole country stands against it...

...Many of these anti-Communists of the Thirties, like Willi Schlamm...

...the Freeman (under its old editors) coyly applauded McCarthy as a tough hombre...

...The Communist party is, primarily, a conspiracy...

...Should we not ask: How much infiltration was there, how much remains, what is the cost of rooting out Communists...

...In the unconscious, says Freud, there is no sense of time...

...Astonished, I asked, "What press...

...And for those who roar of the need for more investigations and security regulation's, be can say...

...In recent years, there has been a growing myth that the Communists in the 1930s dominated the cultural life of America, its publishing houses, Broadway, Hollywood and the colleges...

...Drawing from the insights of the neo-orthodox theologians, with their insistence on man's limitedness and the pervasiveness of evil in all social action, they distort these teachings and become Grand Inquisitors in their effort to shrive the liberal of his "sins...

...Hicks simply asks: What would you abolish??Social Security, the regulation of banks, the protection of labor's right to organize, guarantees against foreclosures, aid to farmers, what...

...To those who are fake or naive liberals...

...Motivations are difficult to plumb...

...the pro-McCarthy intellectuals claim that the liberals influence key opinion in the country and that they, a small, martyred group, are discriminated against in the major opinion-making centers...

...On balance, however, they are for him: and, if his methods are crude, remember that ""politics is a rough game" and "his goal is important...

...On a plane back from Washington one day over a year ago, I met Robert Morris, then counsel for the Jenner Committee, who said: "Have you seen the terrible press we've been getting...

...What they repudiated, at least in the beginning, was not the Utopian goal but the methods...

...not all intellectuals experience the same sense of conversion...

...History...

...In this folly, they themselves commit the greatest sin, the sin of pride...

...But, in moving "left...

...Not all are completely pro-McCarthy...

...When We Came Out...

...with deep knowledge of the face of Communism: Yes...

...The Communists, in fact, felt that the shoe was on the other foot...

...And, while the Communists were able to enlist a sizable number of well-known names for their fronts, the Committee for Cultural Freedom, in its statement in 1939 bracketing the Soviet and Nazi states, had a more distinguished roster of intellectuals than any statement issued by a Communist front...

...The new set of contrast conceptions again pose the question of what is the reality: "The liberal" thinks of himself as a minority under attack...

...I was thinking of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the St...

...is a clue to the appeals of Communism, especially in Western Europe and Asia...

...Hicks's book stands in the authentic liberal tradition...

...Present and past mingle freely, and the scarifying event of yesteryear remains as emotionally vivid as if it were of the moment...

...Is there only one clear foreign policy which flows from a hard attitude toward domestic Communists, and, if so, what is it...

...As Dos Passos exclaimed at the time, confronting the business society: "We are two nations...

...It is this question that ultimately is the root difference dividing those who assess the crucial meaning of Communism...

...a free society has to defend itself, but what are the proportions of the threat, and what are its costs...

...And the crucial fight of the Thirties was to emphasize, against the intellectual piddlers who sought to excuse the harshness of Stalinism on the grounds of Russian national backwardness or the grandeur of the Communist vision, that in social action there is an inextricable relation between "ends" and ' means" and that consistently amoral means warp the goal...

...In these strange times, new polar terms are appearing, but none so strange, perhaps, as this division into "hard" and "soft...

...Yet, as Hicks observes, only one book is ever cited as having been suppressed, anti-Communist authors (Lyons, Valtin, Eastman, Utley) were published, and Communist cells in the universities were small...

...The difference is clearly one of temperament...

...The Communists did not dominate the cultural field, though they wielded an influence far out of proportion to their numbers...

...Daniel Bell, Managing Editor of The New Leader from 1941 to 1944, has been a contributor since 1938...

...If the major weight of Hicks's book is to show that neither the fake liberalism of the Nation nor the pseudo-toughness of the Freeman provides an accurate lens to convey the full richness of the American experience [the two chapters on these magazines were published in The New Leader of March 22 and 29??Ed.], some of the most interesting pages are directed to the question: Why did so many educated people turn to Communism...

...Louis Post-Dispatch...

...where Hicks now lives, it gains from the Emersonian calmness which the frenetic crab-basket of the close New York intellectual community often lacks...

...What does this term mean...

...We are told that while the number of actual Communists may be small, the real problem is that the liberals, especially in the large Eastern universities, are predominantly anti-anti-Communist...

...The liberals are taxed with fighting not the Communists but the anti-Communists (e.g., McCarthy...

...But what is the dimension of present-day Communist infiltration...

...James Burnham, et al., today form the nucleus of the "pro-McCarthy intellectuals...

...Viking...

...250 pp...

...He is now an Associate Editor of Fortune and a lecturer in sociology at Columbia University...

...For Hicks...