Editorial
EDITORIAL Our Fourth Decade In the long essay which concludes War and Peace, Tolstoy observed that historical events become clearer and clearer the further one is removed from them. To the...
...In the single event which, even today, best epitomizes the crisis of our time, we fought both the Fascist and the Communist murderers of the Spanish Republic??and we condemned even more vigorously the inert leaders of the West who allowed free Spain to die...
...Our effort in those years was educational rather than agitational, exploring the new social and economic problems of Asia and Europe, the new political relations within the Soviet bloc, the new capabilities and instrumentalities of American democracy...
...We wish we had the same perspective to view The New Leader as we enter our fourth decade...
...For thirty years now, readers have been asking: "What is your 'line...
...What are you...
...Liberal...
...our ultimate faith was in "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World...
...But the main emphasis was on the weakness and injustice of the American economy??an economy built not for consumption but for profit, a system shot through with speculation and greed, a way of life which at its prosperous peaks had kept the farmer submerged and the worker unorganized...
...But we also fought??for greater understanding of our democratic allies overseas, for humane and realistic aid in building democratic institutions in the former Axis states, for sharp distinctions between international Bolshevism and the oppressed peoples of Russia, China and the satellite states...
...to the historian, the Crusades are now the indispensable prelude to the Ages of Exploration and Imperialism...
...we appealed to men of good will in all lands, classes and parties to join in the critical examination and pursuit of these goals...
...These last years are so close to us that the precise measure of our success eludes us...
...We fought furiously against Nazism and Japanese militarism, but we also battled Bolshevism with new urgency...
...Our second decade is perhaps the one of which we are most proud, even though (or, perhaps, because) we were most alone in those days...
...We are proud, too, of our relentless exposure of Communist infiltration at home, coupled with a continuous opposition to ignorant demagogues and vigilantes who play cheap politics with the security of our democracy...
...We rejected both the anti-Communists who preached isolationism or appeasement of Nazism, and the anti-Nazis who thought Stalin's GPU a fit ally in the struggle against Hitler's Gestapo...
...To be sure, The New Leader criticized the faulty structure of peace, attacked the false prophets Mussolini and Stalin, and warned against the coming strangulation of freedom in Germany...
...Our first decade (1924-1933) was, most definitely, the age of Coolidge and Hoover...
...Now, looking backward, we are only beginning to see our place in the larger pattern...
...Bernard and the gallantry of Richard Coeur-de-Lion became the material of artists and writers...
...Between 1934 and 1943, our spotlight shifted overseas...
...To the twelfth-century European, the Crusades were an intense religious and political movement...
...History??which is the totality of individual human consciences??will inscribe our place in greater designs...
...In the thermonuclear age, we cannot afford, like Lot's wife, to look back too long...
...The vast new challenges of our fourth decade dwarf the accomplished solutions of many problems we had to face in our first three...
...We believed that human life and dignity were precious in every part of the world...
...we preached democracy as an end, as well as a means to social justice...
...Political...
...the unexplored, the suppressed and the heretical...
...Our answers have perforce seemed vague...
...By the nineteenth century, the mass demographic and economic upheavals of the Crusades were recognized as part of a larger pattern, a design which saw the many-faceted expansion of the Europe artificially contracted in the Dark Ages...
...Anti-Communist...
...Socialist...
...We can only approach the future with the same cantankerous pragmatism that has served us in the past, and with the unbroken resolution to be always a goad to the bedeviled, the forgetful, the merciless and the irresponsible, always a forum for the new...
...The passion of St...
...Such statements of principle somehow never quite defined the work we were doing...
...Non-partisan...
...it has never quite returned...
...Our main effort between 1944 and 1953 was to activate a public opinion on Soviet Communism which always seemed two or three years behind political necessity, and, in some cases, twenty years behind historical reality...
...If, as World War II drew to its frustrating climax, there existed a solid core of democrats as eager to stop Stalinism as they were to bury Fascism, we like to think our work in the decade preceding was partly responsible...
...We did not elect LaFollette in 1924, but many of the reforms we stumped for that first year are the law of the land today, and many others??like a national health program??are not far off...
Vol. 37 • October 1954 • No. 41
