THE FEAR OF AMERICANISM

...and to put down the people whom they call Communists — meaning anybody who disagrees with them—they are willing to discard the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution...

...the overriding argument against it is that it would be disastrous for the nation...

...A favorite argument of the more literate enemies of freedom is, "Who's getting hurt...

...then as now, this sentiment was skillfully used by reactionary politicians to try to break down men and opinions which they didn't like, though there was no taint of disloyalty about them...

...McCarthy above all...

...The men who founded this republic—men whose heirs and beneficiaries we are, risked, and knew that they were risking, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor...

...From several years' study of my mail I conclude that there may be as much as twenty per cent of the population of this country that would be ready to follow any gifted rabble rouser just about as far as he wanted to go...

...Also he has two other great advantages—a mass following which, as Joe Alsop has noted, is impervious to facts...

...The headlong decline in Communist Party membership is no doubt partly due to people going underground, but there is ample evidence that many of them are actually giving up and quitting—either from fear or because they have very belatedly realized what they had got into...

...Men who reason that way have not thought, if indeed they are capable of thinking...

...but the bulk of them come from people whom it would be premature to call Fascists but who are certainly Fas-cistoid...

...You can still say what you think, can't you...

...I have had some experience in government and I have never heard of the head of any agency, appearing before the Appropriations Committee, who underestimated the need for his services...

...the behavior of the Soviet Government has cured practically all the others...

...every week somebody tries to stop me...

...If it ever becomes the land of the scared, this republic as we have known it goes down the drain...

...If one side is allowed to use repressive methods against the other, the other can do the same when it gets the upper hand...

...as Prof...

...it will remain the one only so long as it is the other...

...Aren't you free...

...The president of the American Psychiatric Association lately warned his colleagues against "contagion by hostility and anxiety, forces which history has shown to have been far more destructive of human life than any plague...

...Joseph McCarthy, he has been candid enough to admit that when he gets around to the colleges he will pay less attention to Communists than to what he calls Communist thinkers...

...and the majority of it is favorable...

...They have not read recent history...

...Twenty years ago there were a good many of them— never so many as people like Whit-taker Chambers like to believe...

...some won't —especially conservative editors, though not all of them—who will feel that it's all right to try to get rid of a liberal editor, by whatever means...

...Some men will see the danger...

...Certainly there is a little, as a matter of potential sabotage—perhaps even of potential espionage...

...But vestigial Communism in this country still serves one purpose—it provides a pretext for the reactionary politicians who find in ostensibly attacking Communism a cover for attacking liberalism...

...That is the real target now...

...But the practical justification for the Bill of Rights—there is of course a philosophical justification too—is that in my country, power sometimes changes hands...

...Most of the men who profess to be attacking Communism now are really gunning for the people—I don't know what to call them, since liberal and progressive are both terms that have been discredited by some of those who have used them—but people who are not reactionaries nor Communists either...

...told years ago...

...And to point up what he meant he said that "those who will not in these days speak out against error and fear and hate may never speak again in freedom's name...

...This same report seems to have come to the man who wrote the New York Times leading editorial May, 9. "Fear leads to panic," he said, "and panic can lead to the subversion of our most precious institutions...

...Three totalitarian dictators went into the last war...

...What will they do when that runs dry...

...These frightened people provide the mass support for the men who are trying to scare the rest of us—and have already scared some of us—out of defending the freedom of the mind...

...and he has made it clear that his definition of a Communist is a man who criticizes McCarthy...

...Most of them were cured when they did find jobs...

...As for the fellow travelers and sympathizers, that species is practically extinct...

...A poll of Wisconsin farmers taken last winter by an agricultural magazine found that more than half of those who responded thought that the government should forbid some people—naturally those with whom they disagree—to hold public meetings and make speeches...

...Whatever the reason, that hard core is shrinking fast...

...It was not an attack on freedom of the press, they say...

...They choose to ignore the fact that it was an outrageously mendacious examination...

...As for Sen...

...Caughey again, people like that are not afraid of Communism, they are afraid of Americanism...

...But McCarthy's fingers seem to be fireproof...

...and still more important, the avenue to publicity and power...

...more than a third thought there should be restrictions on the freedom of the press...

...Freedom of speech is not preserved without effort—an effort which some few academic communities seem unwilling or afraid to exert...

...the government's loyalty procedures seem to be quite effective in cleaning out people who think for themselves...

...It is not very voluminous, for a news broadcaster, running from a hundred to a thousand letters a week...

...logically this opens the way to such proscriptions and counter-proscriptions as those of the last days of the Roman Republic...

...The record in the Wechsler case was sent to the Society of Newspaper Editors for possible action, or at least a declaration, but its committee wound up with a divided judgment...

...The most interesting thing about these people is that while they profess to be anti-Communists, they do not seem to be interested in Russia at all, and certainly are not worried about Russia...

...McCarthy's recent attack on James A. Wechsler of the New York Post has had that effect on some newspaper editors and some newspaper columnists...

...I have heard of men—not yet very important, but they might become so —who think that war with Russia is inevitable, and that we could win it only if we became totalitarian too...

...Another broadcaster, whose mail is probably heavier than mine and whose views are less controversial, thinks there are probably more than that...

...afraid to let other people think, for fear that what they themselves believe might turn out to be wrong...

...To quote Prof...

...We shall have no heirs and beneficiaries, and shall deserve to have none, if we permit our policy in dealing with either of these dangers to be based on cowardice...

...There is plenty of corroborative evidence...

...But that argument seems effective in lulling some people to sleep...

...but these statements are usually made before the Appropriations Committee, when he is asking for more money for his agency...

...Among his books are "Times Have Changed," "Morals for Moderns," "Love among the Ruins," and "Not to Mention the War...

...Our national anthem describes this as the land of the free and the home of the brave...

...at its end one committed suicide, one had been lynched, and the third came out victorious, thanks largely to the help he got from this supposedly inefficient democracy...

...but underlying that, besides an appalling ignorance, is fear...

...Then as now, the pretext was fear that some of our citizens were loyal to a dangerous foreign power rather than to their own country...

...John F. Caughey of the University of California at Los Angeles has remarked, never in history have so many been thrown into panic by so few...

...They appear to regard Communism as a purely American phenomenon...

...This attack on the freedom of the mind is not merely unjust to individuals...

...II My information as to the mass support for McCarthyism comes largely from my fan mail...

...Ask such a man for whom the bell tolls, and he won't know till it is ringing right beside his desk...

...William Jenner's committee has hauled tip quite a number of people who have been Communists, and some who are probably Communists still...

...and he is smart...

...but want to do their own thinking, and cling to the right of American citizens to say what they think...

...Harold Velde's committee has had a few...

...The foreign danger which we face is certainly no greater, proportionately, than the one which they face...

...Sen...

...It hurts more to have a belief pulled than to have a tooth pulled, and no intellectual novocaine is available...

...I am mindful of the fact that J. Edgar Hoover tells us each year that it is a greater danger than ever before...

...Some of the hostile letters, of course, embody rational criticism...

...then as now, many honest but thickheaded men were convinced that any disagreement with their own opinions was disloyalty...

...As for the Newspaper Publishers Association, nobody would bother even to try...

...but they might be less effective in detecting Communists, who are not allowed to think for themselves...

...If Communism was ever a serious danger in this country—which I doubt—it is so no longer...

...it was only examination of an individual editor...

...hence they are sure these methods will never be used against them...

...Note that these were the last days...

...Their dominant surface emotion is hatred...

...He was director of the Office of War Information during World War II...

...Jenner is not very bright, and Velde is so inept that the friends of freedom may reasonably regard him as our secret weapon...

...and that if by such falsehoods, backed by the power of the government of the United States, you can ruin an individual editor or an individual newspaper, you might scare other editors out of expressing not the opinions which Wechsler was falsely accused of holding but those which he actually holds...

...They are afraid to think because it hurts...

...nor indeed the internal danger...

...and an elite support—respectable men who regard him as the greatest asset of his party, and seem to feel that this outweighs what he is doing to his country, and theirs...

...They were not scared and neither should we be...

...but the supply seems to be running out for they have both had to cultivate the reprint market, rehashing stories ELMER DAVIS is the distinguished news analyst for the American Broadcasting Company...

...Ill What this argument as applied to the Wechsler case really means is that these writers don't like Wechsler and do like McCarthy...

...Yes, I can—thanks to the fact that my employers are more courageous than most...

...Now, how much of a real Communist danger is there...

...but a good many, in the days when young people came out of college and couldn't find jobs...