The Poisoning of Political Discourse
SHILS, EDWARD A.
By Edward A. Shils THE POISONING OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE 'Agitation about secrecy and subversion brings into political influence passions and persons who, under better conditions, are covered by...
...The Democratic party will not forget for a few years yet the canard of "twenty years of treason," and that will coarsen the already rough texture of American political life...
...The stream of anxiety formed about the fear of subversion, like the Communist stream of aggressiveness and bitterness against the existing order, sweeps into itself the many grudges and half-mad angers which it encounters on its path...
...It has certainly become rougher and more brutal under the impact of the fear of subversion and the worry about the safety of secrets...
...The conflict which was always incipient between these two elements was in part fought by the respectable element's effort to render the demagogues powerless by beating them at their own game of demagogy...
...A New York lawyer, dreaming of the Communist seizure of power in his city's schools, offers his cherished works to the educational authorities, while in California another lawyer offers the results of seventeen years of study of Communist influence in school textbooks to show how insidiously the Communists have been at work...
...Throughout American society the preoccupation with secrecy has opened up the sluices of lunacy and venom...
...Then more obscurely, and with a far more massive effect, there are the nameless denunciators who supply derogatory information against Government employes and candidates for governmental appointment...
...The potential xenophobia, populistic fear of conspiracy, hyper patriotism and the other elements of the constellation which lies latent in far more people than it dominates, are brought closer to the surface of judgment...
...Failures who could not get on in the careers to which they aspired become investigators of committees inquiring into the sub-versiveness of philanthropic foundations...
...A former clergyman, who for years excelled in bad judgment and restless and naive antinomianism, who allowed himself to be led by the nose by Communists and who was then cast out by them because of a disagreement, lends his expertise to investigating bodies in order to have revenge on his faithless friends...
...But in the United States, rather more frequently than in Great Britain, sections of the political elite do echo this madness in periods of crisis which they then help to aggravate...
...Thus even if the memory of this period of uncivil politics could be forgotten, the vested interests in its continuance would carry it along...
...Hatred, jealousy, private spites and sheer madness acquire political objects under these conditions and enter into the central arena of the political realm...
...The son of an owner of a chain of hotels begins a meteoric career by writing a childish pamphlet on Communism with which his father seeks to rival the Gideon society by placing a copy in each hotel room under his control...
...so many other Communist front organizations...
...The Reverend J. B. Matthews, the quondam research director of the House Committee on Un American Activities and a very transient member of the staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, had many grudges to work off against his old friends who had cut him off so coldly and meanly after he had served the cause so faithfully in...
...delegate to the 1955Congress for Cultural Freedom at Milan, he is also a frequent contributor to its London organ, Encounter, In his new book, The Torment of Secrecy, which will be published by the Free Press on February 20, he reflects on the postwar evolution of U.S...
...Within the citizenry and within the Government, base passions have been allowed to enter into domains from which it is the responsibility of honorable men to exclude them...
...The flow of mad letters, which is one of the chief modes of direct influence of the hole-and-corner ideologues on their representatives, increases...
...About these persons nothing ran can be said...
...Personal ambitions become intricately involved with ideological passions...
...Problematic types with shady pasts turn up at Congressional hearings to claim for themselves the new kind of heroism, the heroism of having been FBI informants within the Communist party...
...This confirms the populistic politician's view that he is speaking with the people's voice...
...Another young man of less affluent connections is tempted by money and publicity and the ease of destruction to accuse all sorts of persons of being members of the Communist party...
...For one thing, the real security problem is so difficult that its mere existence will continue to arouse some of the populistic, hyperloyalist sentiments which are now part, although not necessarily always, of the dominant tone of American life...
...Shils's book...
...The nearly ten-year-long disturbance of public peace by the angry quest for publicity about conspiracy and by baseless worries about secrecy has left some scars on American society from which it cannot recover immediately...
...Moreover, once institutional practices last a decade and establish a specialized personnel with vested interests in their jobs and procedures, they are extremely hard to eradicate...
...Proximity to the stage will be too tempting for some of them, and they will hang about looking for a political brawl in which they can once more feel the excitement of ideological battle...
...When the conventional roughness and overstatement was fused with the imagery of the political paranoid, the result was a steadily deteriorating situation...
...many of its formulations, we realize, may appear controversial and can best be understood in the full context of The Torment of Secrecy, Nevertheless, Professor Shils does catalogue here a number of excesses which intelligent anti-Communists must face...
...Paul Crouch, too, has many scores to settle and he is eager to do so as long as the Department of Justice pays him and so are the 80-odd ex-Communists who continue their career of personal rancor and hatred.* A poor thing of a refugee without talents and full of spite against his superiors becomes the source of baseless charges against one part of the State Department, a nervous spinster compiles an immense list of names of Communists in the State Department on a roll of wrapping paper for presentation to the Secretary of State...
...Their incapacity for organization and the incapacity of the leaders to whom they give their devotions to organize them and to cooperate with other leaders ordinarily deprive these victims of ideological jitters of weighty political influence through organizations of their own...
...The difficulties of President Eisenhower and his supporters with the demagogues arose from this uncertainty about the effectiveness of the procedures which have for the time being once more proved effective, and from their thoughtlessness about the dangers of the alliance...
...Edward A. Shils is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago...
...Speech became more intemperate in the race to catch attention, to keep one's job or to hold one's constituency...
...Wretched ex-Communists, who for years played with fantasies of destroying American society and harming their fellow citizens, having fallen out with their equally villainous comrades, now provide a steady stream of information and misinformation about the extent to which Communists, as coherent and stable in character as themselves, penetrated and plotted to subvert American institutions...
...Nor will all the persons called forth with passions aroused from the sinks and corners of society crawl back into the dull obscurity in which they lived before...
...This article represents one of the angrier sections of Dr...
...In America, the general etiquette of political discourse is often rude...
...In Great Britain, the alliance of hierarchy, respectability, and the greater capacity of the elite for self-discipline and self closure, usually confines the lunatics to letter-writing and picketing...
...They sell their services to employers who fear the ill-repute and financial loss which might arise from the rumor that they employ disloyal persons...
...Those who do their unpleasant and scarcely rewarding work in anonymity must be somewhat more solid, although it is a job which, although socially necessary, can hardly be very ennobling...
...Checked careers and blighted lives, the down-and-outers and the desperate, find in political enthusiasm, as they still sometimes find in religious revivals, a means of re-entering what appears to them to be a moral life...
...A competition of anti-subversion developed...
...This made it more difficult for them to rally to use the only techniques which were really available to them: constitutional procedures, political combination, and the assertion of the rightfulness and dignity of the respectable position...
...The extremely excitable types probably number no more than a few hundred thousand at most in their pure form, and under ordinary circumstances they are quite harmless to the body politic...
...A U.S...
...Such crankiness is always going on in the United States, as in Great Britain...
...The crudely aggressive speech which abounds in terms like "rat killing" arouses the dormant anxieties of other persons, who if left alone would not be excessively worried about conspiracy and who would not think of scientific secrets at all...
...Those who have appeared in public without the approval of the FBI, broken their discipline and appeared of broken careers, embitterment, shady existences and moral instability...
...Moreover, this reinduction into respectability is for some reinforced by the prospect of income and connections which their new convictions offer...
...They range from responsible and painstakingly careful persons to spiteful neighbors, affronted shopkeepers, angry landlords, resentful janitors, ill-informed students, injured ex-wives and every type of embittered, angry, cranky gossip who feels free to speak in an important role, while feeling safe from the necessity of answering for their protected aggressiveness...
...politics...
...The disadvantage of respectability was aggravated by its half-hearted alliance with demagogy, which it regarded as a possibly useful if not wholly likable ally...
...Public life becomes the scene of the settlement of private grudges...
...The atmosphere is more congenial to their fantasies and hatred...
...Hatred and vengefulness, made free by ignorance and the prospect of reward, produce the information which guides judgment of Government officials who were brought up to know better...
...Frustrated for many years, laboring away in anonymity, they seize the opportunity to emerge into glory in the service of a great cause...
...When politicians like Senators McCarthy and Jenner, the late Senator McCarran and a dozen lesser but still sputtering lights coalesce and send their united voices roaring through the nation, a section of the population and a strand of sentiment which are ordinarily kept at bay expand...
...It move sufficiently for them to assent to the work of the demagogues and for some of them to take their place among the clamant rabble of the ideological fanatics...
...The country does not become hysterical-only intellectuals separated by the Atlantic Ocean or by a great spiritual distance are so ignorant of the hold which routine obligations and personal relationships have on the population-but uneasiness does move in them...
...Not only are politicians moved to greater exertion to share in the publicity, but persons who have never received publicity see in the situation a glorious opportunity...
...Persons who were previously unconcerned began to vie with one another in anti-Communism...
...Even where there is neither money nor fame available, the gratification of spitefulness is available to former landladies, teachers, classmates, and neighbors whose meager knowledge, suspicious dispositions and vague memories lead them to assert that the person they knew fifteen years ago was a member of subversive organizations, read subversive books and papers...
...The agitation about secrecy and subversion brings into the stream of political life and influence passions and persons who, under better conditions, are covered by obscurity...
...By a circular process of mutual stimulation a demagogue like Senator McCarthy stirs up the always rankling passions of the nervous Nellies, who imagine Bolsheviks under their beds, the Pope in the White House and the Jews and Communists ruling the world...
...The respectable part of society has, of course, been put at an enormous disadvantage in its relations with such demagogy...
...By Edward A. Shils THE POISONING OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE 'Agitation about secrecy and subversion brings into political influence passions and persons who, under better conditions, are covered by obscurity' The language of political life in the United States has long been thickly veined with excessive vehemence and denunciatory hyperbole...
...This estimate excludes the rightly unknown numbers of spies whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation must maintain within Communist party cells over the country...
...Commercial enterprises have been established specializing in the assembly of derogatory information about the private lives' of prospective employes...
...The situation is different when, within the institutions of civil government, the ideological syndrome appears...
...The poor failures in life who hitherto had only their own ill-fortune, their lack of talent and the personal disfavor of their superiors to blame, now begin to see a possible transfiguration of their misery...
...But even in the United States the harshness of political language fluctuates...
...The security profession will in a way see to it that the present atmosphere of mutual distrust is maintained, not by deliberate malice, but just because that is the way many of them see the world and its problems...
...One even tells of how Communists planned to take over that simple and pliant institution, the Army of the United States...
...Gradually the tone of speech of the angry and embitter ed begins to color the outlook of the ordinary reasonable man and begins to make him a little less reasonable...
...After examining the normal equilibrium in free society between publicity, privacy and secrecy, he describes the disruptive growth of an intense ideological politics based on an obsession with secrecy...
...Quite apart from this, however, the ten years of conflict have hurt the delicate tissue which binds our society together...
...Even if we disregard the pariahs whose failure to obtain clearance has resulted in a partial loss of civil rights, the memory of this mean-spirited and ungenerous decade will linger for a long time...
...He traces the sources of this malady and its effects on political life, government service, science and the general temper of civil society...
...Their outcries are muffled by a taciturn elite which is impatient with unseemliness...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 2
