Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR DE TOLEDANO I am touched that my old friend, Bill Bohn, devoted a whole column to Lament for a Generation, my new book (NL, April 11). I realize that his attitude toward it must...
...1. I was never a Communist—either a card-carrying member or a dedicated fellow traveler...
...But—is the U.S...
...One does not get that impression, though, from reading the NL...
...Now I am, no doubt, wrong...
...I state categorically that, however I may admire Theodore Roosevelt, he was not a conservative—a fact which any historian will corroborate far more amply than I have...
...Bonn's column excepted, naturally...
...I am not, moreover, an unhappy man...
...My impression is that only the democracies have cancer, while the dictatorships are in the prime physical condition of a strapping boy of 11...
...As to the Russian Revolution, does Bill Bohn disagree with my thesis that the world would have been better—or at least quieter—had Lenin never, seized power...
...I am merely one who, like the Christian mystics and the present-day existentialists, is very much aware of the human condition...
...Reading your excellent periodical I gather that such is the case...
...the only country in the world that makes mistakes...
...New York City RALPH DE TOLEDANO NO SPENGLER PLEASE I never put down a copy of the NL but that I am persuaded that all is hopeless and that there is nothing whatever to do...
...3. When I take up arms against the encroachment of governments, I use the phrase, "Coercive State," which comes directly from the liberal Vernon Parrington...
...As I describe at length in the book, I was caught up in the Popular Front atmosphere, felt strong sympathies toward the Soviet Union until the Hitler-Stalin Pact (though expressing many disagreements), and then broke irrevocably with that phase of intellectual confusion...
...New York City THOMAS L. JELTRUP...
...But for the record, I would like to correct certain misconceptions...
...2. My hero, among conservatives, is Disraeli—the Prime Minister who gave the vote to more Englishmen than any of his predecessors...
...On the other hand, a little more emphasis on the boners of the opposition, would (for this subscriber, at least) remove to a slight extent the complete Spenglerian air of hopelessness which now permeates the pages of THE NEW LEADER...
...Tocqueville is my sponsor where the French Revolution is concerned...
...Your "Between Issues" (March 21) mildly muses on this defeatist state of mind...
...Now if the NL starts writing in the vein of Pollyanna, I shall cancel my subscription eftsoons...
...It was Parrington, incidentally, who set the beginning of the trend toward the Coercive State in the second decade of this century...
...I do have a faith in God which began developing slowly during the years when Bill Bohn and I shared the same room in the NEW LEADER office...
...This colors my view of revolutions...
...still, does that make the pessimism of the NL always right...
...I realize that his attitude toward it must perforce be ambivalent...
...4. I do not have a religion...
...I yield to nobody the privilege and the right (as well as the Tightness) of the NL to criticize the mistakes we make in the sharpest way possible...
...The Communist countries being composed of humans, as ours is, have their own pathology...
Vol. 43 • April 1960 • No. 17
