Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin An Anti-Climax and An Old Alias "When Hungary was invaded and freedom crushed, we sponsored a United Nations condemnation of the Soviet...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin An Anti-Climax and An Old Alias "When Hungary was invaded and freedom crushed, we sponsored a United Nations condemnation of the Soviet Union...
...Surely it was America's finest hour...
...One of many conspicuous merits of Theodore Draper's recent book, The Roots of American Communism, is the author's successful recreation of the apocalyptic effect of the Bolshevik Revolution forty years ago on the mentality of the American Left...
...Otherwise he might still be alive today, looking for new front organizations to join...
...At that time, my main source of livelihood was work on the then arch-conservative New York Tribune, and a "revolutionary" pseudonym was suggested both by economic prudence and by Russian underground tradition...
...How the walls of the Kremlin must have shaken when news was received that the United Nations, for the hundredth time, had expressed disapproval of the latest Soviet outrage—without proposing to do anything about it...
...At one time, there was a stuffy administrative official who bore the name of George Washington Cram...
...After my change of view on the real significance of Communism and the Soviet state, A. C. Freeman died a natural death...
...First, how-foolish it is to judge a person's present convictions by something he might have thought, said or written twenty or thirty years ago...
...Not a few Socialists and labor leaders, opposed to Communism at home, went all out in tributes to Soviet Russia, hailed as the first republic of workers, the pioneer stage of a new social order, more just and humane than any known before...
...A frivolous Harvard undergraduate got himself in hot water by remarking in a student publication that the two most anti-climactic phrases were "For God, for Country and for Yale" and—George Washington Cram...
...General Denikin's advance from the South toward Moscow in 1919 filled me with dismay and I rejoiced at a distance in victories of the Red Armv which, in a later perspective...
...Perhaps Secretary Dulles has contributed a third...
...The last appearance of A. C. Freeman was in a Kharkov newspaper, before I had cut my eye teeth on Soviet realities...
...Second, how fortunate it was for "A...
...It was easy for an emotional partisan to jump at the conclusion that Red terror was an inevitable if regrettable response to White terror, that the acute hunger, cold, disease and general economic breakdown were results not of impracticable, wrong-headed economic policies, but of causes—war and blockade—for which the Communists were not responsible...
...But I know its validity, as regards the minority of Americans who thought of themselves at that time as radicals or "leftists" of one type or another, because I lived through it myself...
...the other as A. C. Freeman, eager for the triumph of world revolution...
...From the time the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, more accurately from the time foreign intervention against them began in the summer of 1918, until I had lived long enough in Moscow to know what political and economic dictatorship meant in terms of crushed lives, routine cruelty and organized stupidity, I was a passionate Soviet sympathizer...
...I am sure in my case and I suspect this was true of others who went through a "fellow-traveler" phase—that sympathy with Communism grew out of strong emotional revulsion against the First World War and the injustices of the postwar settlements...
...A consequence of this phase in my development was the appearance in left-wing publications, definitely not of the mass circulation type, of a character named A. C. Freeman...
...I mischievously gave the newspaper two interviews: one as the representative of the "bourgeois liberal" Christian Science Monitor, reserved and cautiously favorable...
...It is hard to imagine this psychology in the present climate of opinion...
...I felt some qualms about the violent seizure of power and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly...
...But the foreign intervention, weak and halfhearted as it was, fixed in my mind the image of a besieged revolutionary people fighting for the right to determine their destiny against "foreign imperialists" and their Russian hirelings...
...Heroes of Thermopylae, your glory pales in the light of this supremely bold American action...
...I followed every detail of the Russian Civil War as well as possible from the fragmentary news stories of the time...
...Recent speech by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles...
...I came to regard as defeats for European civilization...
...C. Freeman" that no passport snoopers or busybodies prevented him from going to Russia and finding out how wrong his long-distance judgment had been...
...The resounding anti-climax of this feeble reaction to one of history's greatest crimes recalls an anecdote that still circulates at Harvard University...
...Perhaps two modest morals might be drawn from the ease...
Vol. 40 • May 1957 • No. 20
