CATSPAWS FOR THE COMMUNISTS
Stokes, Dillard
Catspaws for the Communists By Dillard Stokes LIBERALS cannot ignore the issue of Communism in the United States today because it will not ignore them. They have to face it, and that means facing...
...They have to face it, and that means facing up to ugly facts...
...Moreover—and this is far more important—there is good ground for these fears...
...Yet most Americans believe they have a right to know whether a person is either one, and then to act upon that knowledge as they think best...
...But this they refuse to do...
...Like any innocent persons under suspicion, their plight calls for sympathy...
...but has one a right to prevent it being reached, by protecting the deception from exposure...
...They got into the State, War, and Navy Departments, into Commerce and Justice, into the atom bomb project...
...As long as they act as though they have something to hide, liberals can't blame people for thinking the worst...
...Actually he was shooting at the New Deal and the people who created and administered it...
...It may have been tenable ground then, but it isn't today...
...They could get back to their traditional advocacy of human rights...
...What else should we call it, when liberals contend, not for a fair investigation, but for no investigation at all...
...The liberals still may say they were right about Mr...
...They fomented strikes, diverted workers' money to Communist causes, and filled trade union channels with Red propaganda...
...It is said many of these persons are Communists no longer...
...Since democracy works in this country, they are going to find out, or break a lot of heads trying...
...Maybe these strictures are justified, but they do not whisk the Communists out of existence...
...Nor have confessed ex-Communists, those who make no bones about their former membership, anything to fear...
...For one thing, neither the Dies nor the liberal point of view got a great deal of notice at the time...
...Their mission was espionage, not casual but planned and disciplined...
...Dies, his motives and his methods...
...They left home liberal youngsters...
...Some of the progressives-but-not-Communists may have been indiscreet, but clearly they have done no wrong...
...To admit that he was sticks in the craw...
...for example, those who say universities have a right to refuse to hire Communists, but no right to dismiss those already hired...
...That was the liberal line of the Thirties...
...Things have changed...
...As the committees of Congress level their sights, liberals are saying just about what they said in the Thirties—that the investigators really are publicity hounds and political opportunists, that they are magnifying a danger that does not exist, that they are invading personal privacy and violating academic freedom, and so on...
...They haven't been doing a good job of this lately: they have been too busy saying hard things about McCarthy, Velde, Jen-ner, and McCarran...
...But the American people want more than guesswork about this...
...Nor is being a typhoid carrier...
...Now, a vast majority of Americans are persuaded that Communists are enemies and traitors...
...But can they now deny that he was dead right about the Communists...
...they are prone to think those who practiced deception are not worthy of trust...
...He was a symbol of Fascism, his tactics an American parallel to those of Hitler who whooped up a red scare for political purposes...
...One has a right to differ with this view...
...Many of those lately jailed made their first contact with the party there...
...On the contrary, the liberals blast Communists as hotly as anybody else...
...It is a shame the liberals have run out on them, to play catspaw for the Communists...
...Should they fail in their current policy—as they now seem certain to fail—they will leave undone what they might have done to achieve fair play—and thus they fail the honest, the loyal, and themselves...
...There is no liberal spokesman who can deny this, and there is none who defends it...
...They fear there are Communists still working in their government, in education, in labor and elsewhere...
...People had their minds set on economic recovery, and on the threat of war in Europe...
...they left college enemy agents...
...There were many who said these things in the Thirties...
...These are samples of the ugly facts liberals refuse to face...
...and those who are, or were, but lie about it...
...But that does not make it sensible to pretend the facts have not come out, or to tag the people's fears "hysteria" and brush them off...
...It is true, though, there is some pretty muddled liberal thinking about them...
...But all that matters here is that avowed Communists have nothing to fear from any investigation...
...In- addition, Communists wormed their way into the labor movement...
...Indeed, they are asking for it...
...The other two groups of likely targets for investigation are not so easily ticked off...
...What is more it calls for help, especially from those who profess concern with human rights...
...Being a Communist is not a crime...
...not that no man shall be disadvantaged without evidence, but that no evidence shall be heard...
...The standard liberal answer went like this: Mr...
...A little thought about the education inquiry will show four groups involved: There are the avowed Communists, for whom the liberals profess neither regard nor concern...
...he was fighting progress...
...The liberal line in 1953 goes back to the early New Deal—the days when Rep...
...they have practiced no deception...
...Martin Dies was seeking Communists under every bush...
...they quit the party years ago...
...they are known for what they are...
...We must bear in mind in 1953 that these investigations have not sprung out of thin air, but out of proof that the Communists both sought recruits in universities and made them centers of espionage and propaganda...
...Instead they raise bitter cries of McCarthyism, murmur a few car-dences on the Bill of Rights, and pretend a dozen years of history did not happen...
...The liberals today offer the same shield to the loyal and to the disloyal, to the honest and the dishonest, to their own liberal colleagues and to the enemy agents who hide among them...
...The records are full of countless cases, including those of Hiss, Wadleigh, Christoffel, Fuchs, Remington, Rosenberg, Coplon, the ousted CIO international unions...
...They were agents of Soviet Russia...
...Anyone who says them now just has not followed the news...
...Then they should set aside absolutes, trick phrases, and high-minded quotations, and exercise the same common sense they would use on a wave of typhoid in the local high school...
...This is true whether it is taken by those who wish to shield the ex-Communists from too-harsh punishment for their lack of candor, or by those who say their real concern is for those who never were Communists at all, but who now are suspects because their past progressive activity lined them up beside Communists, and the crypto-Communists in whose company they now face investigation...
...Their mission was to advance Kremlin policy...
...The last few years have exposed the college campus as a prime source of Communist infection...
...We now know that Communists did in fact get into the government...
...Does it really make sense for liberals to front for the last group...
...But they blast just as hotly all who try to identify these same Communists...
...II By this course, the liberals could bring their policies in line with current history...
...No longer is it reasonable to say that even if they are Communists, it does not matter very much, that Communists are just extremists and really quite harmless...
...Yet liberals today are arguing just that, and are foregoing any chance to argue over how it is to be done...
...They see a real danger here and they want to be sure...
...They are those who are not now and never were Communists...
...Should the liberals succeed in heading off investigation they once more play catspaw for the Communists, and they do their country an ill turn—for there is probable cause to investigate...
...not that the innocent go unscathed, but that the dangerous shall go free with them...
...That is what the present liberal stand leads to...
...Once they are sure, there is the matter of the deception...
...The people who would hold their mistakes against them already do so...
...The people want to know whether this sort of thing is still going on...
...This simply is not open to argument...
...They have not been enemy agents...
...The best service liberals can do themselves, their cause, and their country is to withdraw to some quiet place for a good, long session with the newspapers...
...Dies wasn't fighting Communists...
...University presidents and boards of regents take a serious view of this...
...He said they were in the government, in the movies, in the colleges, in the clergy—in many walks of life, some plausible, some preposterous...
Vol. 17 • September 1953 • No. 9
