Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR THE FUND Arnold Beichman's article "Robert Hutchins Meets the Press" [NL, November 21] reveals how narrow the criticism of an "uncompromising intellectual anti-Communist"-to use his...
...I should like to comment, however, on Norman Thomas's letter in The New Leader of December 12...
...For if Beichman and the uncompromising anti-Communist intellectuals brought home the menace of Stalinism to other intellectuals, it appears to be Hutchins's turn to reveal to anti-Communist intellectuals the menace to our liberties that may reside in a war of extermination against Communists, their sympathizers and fellow-travellers...
...Neither the cause of libertarian-ism nor anti-Communism is served by such divisiveness...
...I am equating the Fund with the USSR...
...Beichman, by sneering at these dangers, weakens his demonstrations of Hutchins's fuzziness and silliness on the Communist question...
...This is serious and disturbing because few Americans have so distinguished a record in the wearying struggle against Communism and cultural vigilantism...
...DEAR EDITOR THE FUND Arnold Beichman's article "Robert Hutchins Meets the Press" [NL, November 21] reveals how narrow the criticism of an "uncompromising intellectual anti-Communist"-to use his phrase-can be...
...I wish he would take another look at my article, in which I argued that precisely because the Fund was doing "important and even necessary work," the kind of leadership provided by Hutchins was its most serious handicap...
...No self-respecting anti-Communist intellectual would today accept such apologias, nor would he be deterred from criticism of Soviet policy because of the Hearst papers or the American Legion...
...Indeed, Beichman seems to he as anaesthetized to the dangers that lurk in an oversensitive security nerve as Hutchins is to the danger of Communism...
...So much for that...
...Back in the bright and shining days when the Soviet Union held out so much hope to the world of the "non-Communist left," there were decent souls who always said, when confronted by such embarrassments as the Moscow trials, that the Soviet Union had such a vast potential for good that its derelictions ought to be overlooked as an unpleasant and temporary deviation...
...between Erwin Griswold's approach to the Fifth Amendment and its pleaders and C. D. Williams's and A. F. Westin's attack on the same problem...
...For the article is strong in its discriminations between the tough anti-Communism of Daniel Bell and Rowland Watts on the one hand and the formalistic anti-Communism of Walter Gellhorn and Helen Lynd on the other...
...Is it too much to expect of the intellectual Hutchins and the uncompromising Beichman that they recognize that there may be as many as two viruses in the body politic at once...
...Finally, they are both engaged in an equally destructive pursuit: Hutchins by attempting to sweep the Communists under the carpet and Beichman by his readiness to yield all of his liberties for the exposure of still another Stalinist...
...If Norman Thomas is certain that what Hutchins has said on the Communist question is just "mistakes," he has information I lack...
...But I don't think that because the overall direction of the Fund is along meritorious lines, "certain mistakes made in speech or in relatively small grants" are to be ignored in an appraisal of Hutchins as President of the Fund...
...The rest of us may be attracted by then to those dangers which are reported in the Fund for the Republic's Annual Report...
...I have not had the advantage of any recent face-to-face private conversations with, Hutchins, as has Norman Thomas, but I would say that if he talked with Fund staffers he would soon find that Hutchins is not regarded as the indispensable man...
...The sufficiently uncompromising anti-Communist will keep after the Communist issue after the last Stalinist has been exposed...
...But this capacity for nice discrimination between hard and not-so-hard and positively soft anti-Stalinists is perhaps no longer as valuable as once it was...
...Beichman replies: I find it difficult to take too seriously a letter which says "Beichman by his readiness to yield all of his liberties ...," or which, in coupling Hutchins and myself, refers to "this union of blindness and bigotry," or which accuses me of seeking "a war of extermination against Communists," or which, while referring to me in the most bitter personal terms, can only talk with patronizing loftiness about "Hutchins's fuzziness and silliness on the Communist question...
...New York City Lester C. Migdal Mr...
...Beichman quotes the Fund report as follows: "Its May 1955 report was full of sweeping charges stated as fact-'the range of suspected persons has been enormously extended by resort to guilt by association,' 'the evidence offered to show that a man is a danger to American institutions has often been farcically remote,' 'a kind of continuous propaganda and social pressure has been kept up that has tended to suppress conscientious non-conformity.'" I submit that the material published by the Fund in the reports of Adam Yarmolinsky and Rowland Watts (two uncompromising anti-Communists) establishes that the first two of these charges may fairly be said to be true and that the third may reasonably be deduced from the first two and our general experience of life today...
...This union of blindness and bigotry has gone far in dividing anti-Communist liberals...
...It has had the tendency to drive liberals and conservatives into opposite camps between which communication becomes ever more difficult...
...But there is tone to Norman Thomas's letter which I find upsetting...
...My own record in combating the vigilantes on the Right over the last several years is to be found in the activities of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, on whose Executive Board I have served since 1952...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 51
