Dusting Off Revisionist Stereotypes
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Dusting Off Revisionist Stereotypes The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s By Richard H. Pells Harper & Row 468 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by William L....
...McCarthyism was a danger most of them recognized, Pells to the contrary notwithstanding...
...The "social ethic" which Whyte identified with the tyranny of the majority included much that a generation earlier intellectuals had being trying to promote...
...Usually he does so by finding that they practiced anti-Communism, an offense so grave that it need only be identified to establish guilt...
...Pells seems to have formed his opinions in the 1960s and then closed his mind...
...Richard Pells takes it for granted that intellectuals should be Leftists...
...How thankful we ought to be that they did...
...By this standard liberals would have been obliged to aid unfriendly witnesses as they struggled to conceal, deny or misrepresent their record of service to dictatorship...
...A handful of brave spirits lightened the general gloom...
...It would have meant helping the enemies, or those who sided with them, of political and cultural freedom...
...But it is surprising to find the old stereotypes dusted off once again by a scholar with, it might be supposed, little personally at stake...
...Still, Pells makes one think here, and regret that he is not concerned with intellectual history so much as the political history of intellectuals, a subject he is not prepared to treat seriously...
...It has been perpetuated by Hellman in Scoundrel Time, and by latter-day progressive journalists who have their own axes to grind...
...They were led astray by high-mindedness and innocence but did no harm, giving the majority of thinkers little cause to abuse them...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Author, "A Better World: The Great Schism—Stalinism and the American Intellectuals" This book is largely about politics and political ideas...
...As the foregoing suggests, this is an odd sort of history...
...Postwar social thought has never received the attention it deserves and Pells does not fill the void...
...Pells has made no effort to explore the document collections now available, such as those of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Committee for Cultural Freedom, or the personal papers of Dwight Mac-donald and others...
...Yet one chapter hints that within this book another, better one was struggling to emerge...
...In 1952 most who knew about her could not forget that she spent the better part of two decades before that as an apologist for Stalinism...
...A number of the relevant titles appear in his notes or bibliography, but do not influence the text...
...Stalinism was too, and not just abroad...
...A mystery never explained by the author is why the intellectuals, whom he respects in some ways, sank so low...
...Certain intellectuals were slow to face facts and wrote silly things about the USSR...
...The best and the brightest did so anyway, creating McCarthyism to their eternal shame...
...In "Conformity and Alienation: Social Criticism in the 1950s" the author discusses William Whyte, David Riesman and other critics who attacked quality of life problems in a remarkable way...
...To them "community" had become "conformity," cooperation was now "other-direction," social consciousness was "groupism,' solidarity with others meant the invasion of privacy...
...And he is most interested in postwar criticism as it would influence radicals later on, not for its own sake...
...Some—Dwight Mac-donald, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy —did not go along with the witch hunt...
...Although her writing a defiant letter might seem all-important to Pells, one must completely lack imagination to miss seeing why democratic intellectuals had to view the incident, and others like it, differently...
...Pells takes the usual line that all anyone should have cared about was protecting the First Amendment rights of Communists and fellow travelers...
...Failing to understand this, Pells falsifies the story...
...Any real history of postwar intellectuals must acknowledge that their anti-Communism was not paranoia or an excuse for something else, but a deeply held conviction resulting from bitter experience...
...Most intellectuals, though, were beyond hope or help, making the postwar the darkest of dark ages...
...His case against them goes as follows: It is true that Communism was an unfortunate doctrine, particularly as expressed in the Soviet Union and other distant lands of no importance to Americans...
...Nor has he paid much attention, if any, to the numerous recent autobiographies by men like William Barrett, Howe and William Phillips, or to books bearing new information like David Oshinsky's/1 Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joseph McCarthy, or to the postrevisionist historians of foreign policy like John Gad-dis who are changing our view of the Cold War...
...One explanation is that The Liberal Mind in a Conservative A ge is not really a work of scholarship...
...Since in the postwar years few intellectuals of consequence remained radical, Pells must unmask them...
...How unsurprising that instead most liberals chose to fight for the principles they themselves believed in...
...Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller stood up to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (huac...
...As he says, they turned ideas that had been crucial to the '30s inside out...
...To him Lillian Hellman is brave and honorable because she took a little jab at huac...
...He raises questions that he does not answer...
...Its comic strip version of the postwar Red scare was formulated at the time by Leftists and "progressives," sympathizers who without being Communists themselves regarded anti-Communism as the worst political sin...
Vol. 68 • April 1985 • No. 5
