In Defense of Liberty

...For example, he refers to the "essentially mythical Communist menace in Italy and Germany," exploited by Mussolini and Hitler "to persuade their peoples to accept full-fledged systems of totalitarianism" (italics mine...

...Ginzburg carefully reminds us that twice before—during the period of the Alien and Sedition Acts and during the "red scare" of the 1920s—Americans have jettisoned the Bill of Rights, and then, after having recovered their sanity, returned to the path of freedom...

...He sometimes makes unequivocal statements for which he presents little or no evidence, and, as Reinhold Niebuhr notes in his introduction, his generalizations are often too sweeping...

...And, unless America takes great pains to excise them, it will not recover its lost freedoms...

...The hysteria and suspicion which the investigations had engendered were then intensified from 1946 on by the cold war with the Soviet Union...

...He notes that Party membership fell from 80,000 in 1944 to 22.000 in 1955, and to less than 5,000 in 1958, and that the whole program of loyalty investigations of government employees has not uncovered a single spy or Russian agent...

...Ginzburg's views deserve attention and respect...

...If we are now to restore our eroded liberties, we must uproot the whole network of "anti-libertarian institutions" that have been created during the last 20 years—the use of Congressional investigating committees as a device for punishing with opprobrium the holders of unorthodox opinions, the enactment and enforcement of Federal and state anti-sedition laws which make it a crime to express "subversive" ideas, and the whole mechanism of Government loyalty-security investigations which penalize those suspected of heterodox opinions and associations by depriving them of their jobs and imposing the stigma of "disloyalty" upon them...

...He tells us that many private groups, including private universities, "operate loyalty screening programs...

...Which ones...

...While recognizing the danger of Soviet espionage, Ginzburg insists that it can best be dealt with by the normal "rational procedures" of counter-intelligence, and not by futile and dangerous attempts on the part of security administrators to determine the "loyalty" and "unsubversive" character of government employes, scientists, scholars or defense workers...

...In fact, two persons who did engage in espionage while employed by the government—Joseph S. Petersen and Judith Coplon—were caught by ordinary counter-intelligence methods after having been cleared by the security bureaucracy...

...On Liberty," one of the most cogent arguments ever advanced against governmental or social control over opinions and beliefs, admitted that "even opinions lose their immunity [to control] when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act...

...These cancers must be completely excised if the body social and politic is to be restored to health...

...In Defense of Liberty Rededication to Freedom...

...Ginzburg would agree with Justice Douglas' characterization of the American Communists in his dissenting opinion in Dennis v. United States—"miserable merchants of unwanted ideas...

...Nor does he face the fact that in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as in the U.S., Communists and Communist sympathizers have given aid and assistance to the Russians' espionage activities...

...His passionate defense of freedom of opinion, which is certainly one of the primary values of a democratic society, and his zeal for fair and equal treatment of all citizens are altogether laudable...

...He strengthens his case by his forthright rejection of Communist doctrine and practices, and he forcefully underlines many of the dangerous and foolish aspects of the anti-Communist crusade...

...He states that "we cannot get away from the fact, amply supported in [Lord Jowitt's] book, that Hiss was the victim of prosecutory maneuvers which abridged his right to a dispassionate and morally fair trial...

...These anti-libertarian instruments, and the powerful investigatory and security bureaucracy that has a strong vested interest in perpetuating them, are, for the author, striking symptoms of "the sickness of the American spirit—the sickness manifested in the partial abandonment of the principles of freedom...

...Once he begins to consider these factors, he finds himself involved once again in exactly those dilemmas and difficulties that Ginsburg thinks he has eliminated...

...Certainly, Ginsburg is guilty of over-statement or carelessness when he says, parenthetically, that "not till 1948 was the Smith Act invoked against them [the Communists]—falsely, according to present Supreme Court opinion" (italics mine), and when he asserts that "the Smith Act has been for all practical purposes invalidated by recent decisions of the Supreme Court...

...Underlying his argument and his prescriptions is the view that the Communist menace in the United States, the presumed justification for all these infringements on freedom of opinion and association, is a complete myth...

...Reviewed by Herbert A. Deane Associate Professor of Government, Columbia University BENJAMIN GINZBURG is exhorting his fellow Americans to forsake the false gods of heresy-hunting and loyalty investigations and to return to the true faith of freedom as embodied in the Bill of Rights...

...This formulation, which bears a striking resemblance to Justice Holmes' later "clear and present danger" doctrine, indicates that even the most forthright defenders of freedom of expression have not regarded it as an absolute value, but rather as a very important good, which has to be maintained without sacrificing other significant goods...

...But surely the official responsible for hiring one of the candidates cannot, in his efforts to assess an applicant's "trustworthiness," dismiss as irrelevant his adherence to, or even sympathy with, Communist doctrines...

...Yet there do exist weaknesses and inadequacies in his argument...

...When he comes to deal with the crucial question—should Communists be hired for sensitive jobs in government?—he tells us that "normal systems of selection should be followed," that is, that untrustworthy persons should be barred "on the basis of their untrustworthiness" and not because of their ideological or political views...

...As a political theorist I may, perhaps, be pardoned for noting in conclusion that John Stuart Mill in his essay...

...The author rejects out of hand the suggestion that security measures be retained in sensitive areas of government operations and removed from the nonsensitive areas, without even referring to the British attempt to deal with the problem in this fashion...

...How many private universities do this...

...He insists that any attempt on the part of the state to restrict freedom of opinion, conscience or association—whether through the courts, administrative agencies, statutes or Congressional investigations—is a violation of the Jeffersonian heritage of the inalienable rights of the citizen, the heritage which has been the foundation of America's greatness and which must be the basis of its future...

...Gradually, the myth gained acceptance by the investigators themselves and by the government and the public...

...The myth was invented in 1938 by Congressman Martin Dies, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was created under his chairmanship, and it was designed to veil his real objective, an attack upon the New Deal and upon labor's role in it...