Fair Game

...Though at the critical early stage he may hope his serum will be used to serve mankind, he cannot be certain it will not be used to poison somebody's water...

...That was not what most of us wanted to hear in 1940...

...Yet the real problem is of a different dimension altogether...

...His faith resides not in any specific consequence of his work, but in the work itself...

...The principle of "objectivity" they mocked as a snare of the Establishment...

...But we may assume, from its placement on the jacket, that the blurb does not displease the author??and insofar as the theme of the book can be stated in a couple of sentences, Alperovitz has stated it...

...What the radical contingent had to offer, however, was mainly a social-work approach to the life of scholarship...

...Anybody who knows something of the period is likely to come away grateful for what he has received, but most conscious of what has been omitted...

...Freeland has produced inferior art...

...Well-intentioned psychologists have told me that they do not think research into the subject of the relative IQs of blacks and whites ought to be pursued, lest the results feed the fires of bigotry...

...Across the line in the scientific disciplines, the frequently heard call for "responsibility" often seems to suggest that the scientist can know, very early in his labors, the ultimate effects of his research...

...The workaday minds, ever in the majority among revisionists as among Establishmen-tarians, are not likely to be improved or diminished by attachment to one fad or another...

...The great limitation of such a study??and this applies to the revisionist school as a whole??is that it smooths out the complexities of men and events in its insistence on making a case...

...They are evidently telling us what many of us do wish to hear??that America has been a mischief-maker in international affairs and, generally speaking, a power for ill...

...To be sure, every historian needs a theme, and the great themes, such as Gibbon's or Burckhardt's, give him space to exercise his perception and his imagination as well as his scholarship...

...While they are certain to draw energy from their devotion to their current cause, they may find themselves restricted by it as well...

...In its integration decision of 1954, the Supreme Court showed sociologists that the right body of research can be used as a pretext for improving the law of the land...

...that, after all, is the nature of greatness...

...they aspired not to raise sociology to a science or an art, but to reduce it to a soup kitchen...

...It need have nothing to do with politics...

...I cite it only as a new and fair example of the revisionist school in action...

...I could not question either their commitment or the possibility that their profession could stand improving...

...Or at least novelty, which is nearly as desirable...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Revisionism Revisited The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism is a recent contribution to that historical revisionism which has been enjoying a lively play in this country during the past few years...

...Now, my reading of Freeland's work leaves me with the impression that Alperovitz pays no compliment by fitting it to his specifications...

...mainly, they react to threats against them from the West...

...Our various gestures of aggression naturally compelled the Russians to respond in kind...

...Specializing in World War II and the cold war era, the revisionists have given us a picture of an America ascendant putting its great power to largely unworthy uses, for motives that were grossly self-serving when they were not madly ideological...

...My intention here is not to review Freeland's work...

...Written by 31-year-old Richard M. Freeland, the book is endorsed on the dust jacket by a fellow revisionist, Gar Alpero-vitz, himself celebrated for his argument in Atomic Diplomacy that dropping A-bombs on Japan was a ploy by U.S...

...Where it may hurt is among the gifted revisionists and fraternal spirits in departments other than history...

...Revisionism was not invented by our current revisionists...

...There comes a time when any spirited apprentice will turn on his master??to show that he has learned all he can learn, that he is his own man, that the master is the past and he is the future...

...the book is not as simplistic as the tribute would suggest...

...The revisionists have settled on a small theme and they are trapped by it...

...The value of such a study is that it draws our attention to political and economic pressures and motives we may heretofore have accorded insufficient weight: for example, America's economic stake in European recovery after the War...

...Whether one can best make one's contribution??to oneself, to society, to the world of the mind??by furthering the accepted opinions of the period or by attacking them seems to depend more on some chemical reaction between the temperament of the scholar and the temper of the period than on any revelations gained in the laboratory...

...The view has been spreading through all the academic disciplines ??not sparing even the Modern Language Association??that the effort involved in research and analysis is worth little if it does not advance a greater cause...

...they wished to put sociology to the service of The People...

...He just goes forward...

...The few great minds will not be deterred by fashion...

...There is a natural, and healthy, impulse in every academic field to cry Nay to those who have gone before...

...Who would not have been grateful to them had they come up with a method for ungluing sociologies...

...Freeland is content with a very partial and often superficial reading of the events of 1946-48...

...In what we call the social sciences, where methodological rigor will take one only so far??and not very far at that??a strongly stated theme is required for a work to make an impact...

...The young scholar commits himself to travel in a certain direction before he can know much about his destination...

...The warmth of our welcome to, say, Milton Friedman's economics, is closely related to our attitude toward the free enterprise system or theology...

...Alpero-vitz writes of Freeland: "His thesis that the [McCarthy-ist] fanaticism and hysteria were the direct result of the Truman administration's premeditated and deliberate campaign to exaggerate the communist issue is well documented, important and very revealing...

...Thus in Freeland's book one finds Harry Truman and his accomplices behaving as servants of Eastern commercial interests, as manic anti-Communists, as demagogues, and as the causes of much trouble abroad and at home...

...It follows that the cold war was our invention, leading inexorably to Vietnam...

...In the Academy as elsewhere, virtue creates its own inhibitions...

...Can we count on such prudent scholars to liberate the rest of us...

...Off they go, those bands of scholars, seeking proof of the truths they already possess??and taking care to avoid those murky areas that may call their faith into question...

...Biographies of scientists indicate that in actuality an unusual man gets caught up in a subject that fascinates him and tracks it as far as he is able...

...That may smack of amorality—but one would have to be a fortune-teller to operate differently...

...They had been brought together by their shared distaste for a sociology which they contended had been coopted by an imperialist, racist and sexist society...

...The theme need not be impeccable but, for the sake of the historians and his readers, it ought to be spacious...

...The premature revisionists who sought to persuade us before Pearl Harbor that President Roosevelt was bent on drawing the nation into a foreign war could make a plausible case??but they found small welcome...

...The economist or sociologist or historian who hopes to leave a mark must have a point of view at least, and perhaps the semblance of an idea to fuel his efforts and command our interest...

...This healthy impulse must be encouraged, for that way lies progress, does it not...

...Free-land's secondary argument??that Truman administration officials (particularly in connection with the Marshall Plan) pressed their views because they feared European economic instability might help trigger a domestic American economic collapse??is backed up by impressive evidence...

...statesmen to show the Soviets who was in charge...

...Outside of making annual meetings of college professors unbearable for the rhetoric, the present commotion should not greatly impede the cause of knowledge...

...In this drama, the Soviets rarely initiate actions in their self-interest...

...My summary, let me hasten to grant, does not do justice to the more subtle of the revisionists, but it does, I think, convey the message that most readers must take from their works...

...Of course, one's timing may be off...

...Historians with a Shtick The welcome to today's revisionists of the Left has been much kinder...

...Those who hold this view, frequently expressed in terms of "liberation," know in their hearts what this greater cause is and how to advance it...

...Soup Kitchen Sociology As an observer at a meeting of the American Sociological Association a year or two ago, I spent the greater part of the time with members of the Radical Caucus...

...Whether a chemist ought to help the Defense Department plan the defoliation of Asian villages may be a relatively easy moral question...