This Mean-Spirited Decade' eugene Lyons

...He knew that the Matusow affair had been explored most thoroughly in Congressional hearings...

...Dozens of Americans publicly identified as involved in espionage operations live quiet, unmolested lives by reason of the statute of limitations or other technicalities...

...Allowing for a margin of error and exaggeration that is inevitable even in the most honest and good-willed witness, the evidence provided by Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, Hede Massing, Louis Budenz, J. B. Matthews and nearly all the others has been remarkably accurate...

...The disillusioned Communists face the harrowing problem, both moral and material, of whether "to tell or not to tell...

...Shils should have known that the Justice Department "says 90 per cent of the persons [Matusow] identified with the Communist party also were identified by other witnesses or other evidence, and that his testimony regarding the others was not disproved...

...Can anything be more mean-spirited than his blanket condemnation and reckless smear of all former Communists who chose to make their special knowledge of Communist persons and techniques available to the Government...

...There has been no mob violence...

...There doubtless are other Chamberses and Bentleys as yet unknown to the public wrestling with their consciences, torn between the duty of telling all and the risks of sticking their necks out...

...How, then, would he justify the arbitrary, all-inclusive accusation without conceding that he is himself the victim of "the passions aroused from the sinks and corners of society" which his disturbed imagination discerns...

...On January 9, we published a chapter from Edward A. Shils's new book, The Torment of Secrecy, which described people usually covered by obscurity who enter the mainstream of politics in times of agitation about secrecy and subversion, and help poison normal ways of political discourse...

...It was inevitable that the realization of the magnitude of the mischief and its success, particularly in Government, should churn up emotions...

...He would be on more reasonable grounds if, in alleging demagogy to Senators McCarthy, Jenner and the late McCarran, he had balanced the score with a similar allegation against Flanders and Langer on the other side of this issue...

...What a small minority of Americans, including The New Leader, had long known about the Communist conspiracy in our midst suddenly became known to the whole American people after the war...

...On the testimony of his own article--"The Poisoning of Political Discourse" in The New Leader of January 9, 1956--that is how he would have behaved under the imaginary circumstances described...

...Of course, there is a world of difference between a Chambers and a Matusow...

...The thesis that a problem of national security and national survival tends to whip up strong feelings can be defended--but not, I submit, the thesis that all the feeling is on the militantly anti-Communist side...

...Was it financial greed that motivated Chambers, who sacrificed a lucrative job in the process of doing what he considered his duty...

...It has weathered the lest of court action, press attacks and systematic derogation by men like Shils...

...In the subsequent inquiries into the crime, he carefully concealed his crucial knowledge, believing ardently that to cooperate with the authorities in preventing or exposing crime is per se dishonorable :and even a species of insanity...

...All the pressures of social comfort, economic safety, sheer fear of reprisal, are in the direction of silence...

...The overwhelming discovery coincided, moreover, with a time of war (Korea) and fears of war which were impinging on the daily lives of every family in terms of taxes, military draft, actual casualties...

...A Reply to Edward Shils 'This Mean-Spirited Decade' By Eugene Lyons A high-minded professor of political economy at the University of Chicago, glancing casually out of his office window, saw several students setting fire to an adjoining building...

...Professor Shils's unsupported assumption that those who choose to talk invariably do so for shabby reasons like revenge or publicity or profit is a shocking thing...

...Of the thousands who have broken with the Communist party and Soviet "apparatuses," only a few score have had the courage to come forward and make amends for their past...

...Here is a reply by Eugene Lyons, roving editor of the Reader's Digest and author of Assignment in Utopia, The Red Decade, Our Unknown Ex-President, and Our Secret Allies: The Peoples of Russia...

...and that only "failures . . . wretches . . . the down-and-outers and the desperate," inflamed by "the prospect of reward" and the urge to "settle private grudges," would willingly join their wicked company...

...His name is Edward A. Shils...

...There has been no perversion of judicial processes...

...But the professor is not...

...The fact is that the kind of extremism...

...Was it a hunger for publicity, when he kept quiet for nearly ten years, until the state of world affairs forced him to act...

...One wonders whether the professor would be willing to test his blanket indictment by the case of Whittaker Chambers, the most celebrated of the "talking" ex-Communists...

...In the nature of the case, he cannot have examined all the 80-odd...

...Professor Shils writes, as if he were stating fact instead of his own hysterical preconception, of "the 80-odd ex-Communists who continue their career of personal rancor and hatred" by collaborating with the Department of Justice...

...Quickly he pulled down the blind and returned to the manuscript he was working on...

...Short of giving up any marginal pretense of scholarly objectivity or simple fairness, he would have to admit that there may be in this group a few men and women who are moved neither by rancor nor hatred but by a sense of social duty or the prod of conscience--however mistaken their zeal may be in his own opinion...

...Was it malice, when we know that he sought at great risk to shield Hiss against the full consequences of his disloyal conduct...

...There have been loud voices crying the menace of Communism and demanding greater vigilance...

...The episode is entirely fictitious...

...The angry professor prefers to cite poor befuddled Harvey Matusow instead...

...Professor Shils does our country no service in letting them know in advance that he and his ideological brethren will mudgun them to death if they dare break the self-imposed silence...

...that all informants are by definition foul, greedy and psychopathic "informers...

...His article is the most unfair, illogical and malicious anti-anti-Communist effusion that has appeared outside the pro-Communist press in many a year...

...But Professor Shils has no more right to make Matusows of all ex-Communists who give testimony than I would have to make Chamberses of all of them...

...It was obvious to anyone who read the record that (in the words of the committee's findings) "Matusow had been telling the truth in his testimony all along until he again fell into the hands of the Communists...

...if, in attacking the zeal of a Dr...

...Even in this citation he is less than scholarly...

...Can anything be more ungenerous than his failure to make a single exception in his imputation of vicious and sick motivations to all who have given witness against Kremlin agents before legislative committees, in court rooms or in Department of Justice inquiries...

...The extraordinary fact is that the country, on the whole, remained comparatively calm and at times even apathetic...

...blanket accusations and name-calling exhibited in the Shils article is typical of those who share his views...

...on the contrary, the courts have bent backward to give accused people the benefit of every legal loophole...

...But they have added up to little more than a whisper compared with the shrill cries about the menace to civil rights, the wickedness of anti-Communists, the horrors of the "reign of terror" that existed only in the imagination of its inventors...

...If this has indeed been, as Professor Shils claims, a "mean-spirited and ungenerous decade," then he is himself a distressing exhibit of the claim...

...Obviously he would not "inform" on the mischievous or disgruntled students in a trivial matter of incendiarism...

...He had recognized the young incendiaries and was acting firmly to evade the unpleasant duty of acting as an "informer...

...Matthews on the one hand, he had mentioned the zeal of a Henry Commager or the late Bernard De Voto on the other...

...His readiness to denounce all those who in the past ten years have given personal testimony about an incomparably greater crime--the Kremlin-directed conspiracy to destroy his country by infiltrating its Government and subverting its institutions--indicates that he would withhold valuable information reflecting on Soviet spies if he had it...

...The rest preferred to slink into the anonymous mass and take no chances on their "respectability.' Even when dug up against their will, they have preferred the ambiguous status of Fifth Amendmenters...