Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS Lamont: A Knight In Tarnished Armor By William Henry Chamberlin Afull-page advertisement in the New York Times Book Review costs a good deal of money and is designed to...
...He possesses the doubtful intellectual distinction of having signed two of the silliest documents of a silly era...
...A year later, by exquisite irony just on the eve of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, this dauntless knight of freedom charged again...
...Liberal" ministers of religion sang hymns of praise to an atheistic regime which was cruelly persecuting all forms of religious faith...
...But before I rushed out to buy this libertarian masterpiece, memory began to function and any desire to read the book quickly evaporated...
...The ad went on to laud Lamont's book as "the expression of a civilized and independent mind, which points the way to a revitaliza-tion of freedom in America...
...Before I quite remembered who Corliss Lamont is, I felt that here might be a modern Milton presenting a new Areopagitica, a John Stuart Mill with a 20th-century essay on liberty, a modern Voltaire, or, at the very least, a knight of liberty in shining armor...
...It reminds one of the Congressman of old who staggered in dead drunk to vote for Prohibition when the Anti-Saloon League had put the squeeze on him...
...Was he expressing shock and horror at Stalin's purge-trial lynchings...
...Most of the signatories probably could not even have spelled or pronounced correctly the names of the purge-trial victims, much less understood the background of the liquidations...
...As President of the Friends of the Soviet Union, Corliss Lamont was a cheer leader of the "Hurrah for Murder" forces...
...with Corliss Lamont among them, they solemnly declared that "the preservation of progressive democracy" made it necessary for "democrats and progressives" to endorse Stalin's blood purges...
...It set forth the merits of a "thoughtful, courageous book" by Corliss Lamont, identified as a "philosopher, writer, teacher and defender of the rights of man" who has been "in the active center of the American scene for many years...
...It is against this long record, continued during and after the war, as a smug apologist for Stalinist judicial murders (now being questioned even in Communist countries) that Corliss Lamont has the amazing audacity to present himself as a "philosopher" and "defender of the rights of man...
...His name appears as a signatory on one manifesto after another applauding the prefabricated Moscow Trial verdicts...
...I noticed such an advertisement in the issue of April 1, which is traditionally April Fool's Day...
...With some 400 companions in folly, Lamont set his name to the declaration that the Soviet Union "had nothing in common with Germany" (assertions to the contrary were "fantastic falsehoods") and that "the Soviet Union continues to be a consistent bulwark against war and aggression...
...One was a declaration of "nearly 150 prominent American artists, writers, composers, editors, movie actors and Broadway figures," whose names were published in the Daily-Worker of April 28, 1938...
...Of course, there were honorable exceptions, including significantly almost every writer and journalist with first-hand experience of the Soviet Union and any reputation for professional integrity...
...This preposterous stunt invites jeering laughter, not applause...
...The armor of this self-styled knight of liberty is very tarnished...
...That was truly the age of what Peter Viereck has called "the shame of the intellectuals," the age when acts of oppression and inhumanity, rightly denounced in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, were openly defended or praised with faint damns if they happened to take place in the Soviet Union...
...Quite the contrary...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS Lamont: A Knight In Tarnished Armor By William Henry Chamberlin Afull-page advertisement in the New York Times Book Review costs a good deal of money and is designed to attract attention...
...Was he cooperating with John Dewey and others who exposed the innumerable instances of fraud in the official indictments of the Old Bolsheviks...
...The rights of man would be in a sorry plight if they had to rely on Corliss Lamont, endorser of Stalin's terror, as their defender...
...But, as I am sure many old-time contributors to The New Leader will agree, it was an uphill struggle to get a hearing for a truthful picture of Soviet conditions...
...Never mind...
...The decade before the Stalin-Hitler Pact has always seemed to me to represent an all-time low in the record of the American intelligentsia...
...Writers and artists who professed to cherish freedom of expression composed eulogies of a regime that had wiped out humanist culture in Russia, that had executed and imprisoned some authors, driven others to suicide, and put the rest in a strait-jacket of strict conformity...
...Now where was Corliss Lamont, the "civilized and independent mind," that "philosopher and defender of the rights of man," during this testing period...
...It was a time when professed rationalists repudiated the plainest factual evidence, when humanitarians not only condoned but glorified acts of inhumanity unmatched since the darkest ages of the past...
Vol. 39 • April 1956 • No. 18
