'DANGEROUS NONSENSE'
Jr, Arthur M. Schlesinger.
'Dangerous Nonsense' By Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. THERE IS something in Mr. Stokes' lament, but not much. It is perfectly true that those softheaded liberals, who for years refused to make any...
...But this does not make it necessary for liberals to apologize to McCarthy and Velde —particularly those liberals who, as Mr...
...Stokes' adoring phrase, "dead right about the Communists," that McCarthy and Jenner and Velde are on the right side in their current investigations, and that all liberals should withdraw to some quiet place until they are prepared to recognize these noble truths is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense...
...There may be just a few college Communists, and then again, the faculty clubs may be crawling with them...
...and Dillard Stokes suggests that liberals are not to criticize McCarthy...
...II Or take the Dies speech of Feb...
...It is perfectly true that those softheaded liberals, who for years refused to make any distinction between themselves and Communists, are not in a strong position to denounce Sen...
...The Communists who "spread their infection of intrigue and deceit wherever they go," who are "engaged in a massive attack on the moral fabric of the American left," who "have stymied honest discussion of the Communist issue by raising the cry of 'red baiting' and Rankinism...
...In March 1940, Isaac Don Levine reported to Dies the story of Communist penetration which Levine had heard a few months before by Whittaker Chambers...
...But, if McCarthy were motivated by any The Debaters DILLARD STOKES, formerly on the staff of the Washington Post and more recently special counsel for the CIO Political Action Committee, has twice received the Hey-wood Broun Award of the American Newspaper Guild...
...Stokes and I well know...
...He won the Award in 1942 for his wartime investigation of enemy agents and their American backers, and six years later won special recognition for his coverage of the U.S...
...9, 1950, now denounces Wechsler and me as of doubtful loyalty...
...If a Communist teacher in a university faculty does none of these things, I am constrained to agree with the late Sen...
...We know there are some: they admit it...
...The professor ticks off this danger in one flat sentence, one categorical, absolute, absurd avowal of fact...
...Stokes will concede, have been fighting Communism a good deal longer than McCarthy has...
...Ill As Mr...
...The fact is that McCarthy is no more truly anti-Communist than the Communists themselves were truly anti-Fascist...
...where...
...But though the scatter-brained Texan issued a public statement that he would soon hear testimony from the 'head of the OGPU' in America, he seemed much more interested in pursuing hapless liberals and belaboring fellow-travelers than in busting open the spy ring...
...And what was happening to the Stalinist conspiracy while Dies was devoting his energies to smearing and harrying people like Reinhold Niebuhr, Ken Crawford, and Paul R. Porter...
...Not at all...
...In 1946, when I was writing a full-length indictment and exposure of Communist activities and influence in this country for Life magazine, and when Jimmy Wechsler resigned from the newspaper PM because of its closeness to the Communist line, Joe McCarthy was accepting Communist support in his primary fight against Bob La-Follette in Wisconsin...
...Stokes evidently thinks that there is an overwhelming threat—"a real danger"—to American security today arising out of our colleges and universities...
...The fact is that by the time he came along—1950—Communism had been reduced to political negligibility in this country...
...Scheslinger's Reply IAM glad to note that Mr...
...Dies was far too busy smearing and denouncing plain liberals and New Dealers, including many of the leading anti-Communist liberals of the day, to bother with real Communist agents...
...Supreme Court for the Washington Post...
...In the past few years numbers of Communist agents and dupes have been exposed...
...But how many of them were ever detected or even mentioned by Martin Dies...
...Stokes' assertions and quotations, there is not one single item of specific evidence to show that Communism in our colleges today constitutes any threat at all to national security...
...This view is exactly the one that the Communists and the Fascists have been trying to sell us for a generation...
...Hiss, Miss Coplon, or Sergt...
...What we need today is more liberal courage—and not more liberal masochism...
...His anti-Communism was simply a pretext for attacking liberals and New Dealers...
...I wrote that article because in 1946 the Communists did constitute a serious internal danger...
...Remington, Mr...
...ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., historian at Harvard, is one of the founders and co-chairmen of the mili-tantly anti-Communist organization of liberals, Americans for Democratic Action...
...Among the people denounced by Dies as "a significant part of the interlocking directorate of the Communist movement in the United States" were such prominent anti-Communists as Reinhold Niebuhr, A. Philip Randolph, George Counts, Kenneth Crawford, John Edelman, Tom Am-lie, Louis Fischer, and many others...
...Who was this report aimed at...
...If the nation could survive the organized activity of Communists on college faculties in a time of depression and despair, then it certainly does not have much to fear from them today when a Communist idea has about as much future in this country as a snowball in hell...
...The Communist Party...
...He is the author of several books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Age of Jackson" and "The Vital Center...
...Communists have succeeded in hiding their true face from American Liberals...
...Espionage is another matter—and one for the government's counter-intelligence agencies...
...but we need something more than abstract assertion to accept the claim that pro-Communists on college faculties are any threat to our national safety...
...Six or eight hundred words of personalities and the potato is supposed to be cool enough to handle...
...you must either be for McCarthy or for the Communists...
...What threat...
...We know others have refused to answer because the answer would incriminate them...
...It is obvious that Communists are (and always have been) either knaves or fools...
...honest desire to "identify" Communists, why should he spend so much time chasing after the Wechs-lers, the Chip Bohlens, the Ache-sons, the Marshalls, the DeVotos...
...Or perhaps a pro-Nazi organization...
...In so doing, he does me the honor of quoting extensively from an article I wrote about the Communists for Life in 1946...
...Stokes' canonization of Martin Dies...
...Take, for example, Dies' special report to Congress of June 25, 1942, entitled "Subversive Activities Aimed at Destroying Our Representative Form of Government...
...Joseph McCarthy for refusing to make that same distinction today...
...Don't mention Mr...
...This list included such stout anti-Communists as Paul R. Porter, David J. Saposs, Gardner Jackson, John Herling, Paul F. Brissenden, and others...
...and it had been done primarily by liberals—the Truman Administration, Walter Reuther, David Dubinsky, Americans for Democratic Action, and all the rest of the people whom Dillard Stokes thinks should genuflect before Dies and McCarthy...
...By 1950 Communism no longer constituted an internal political threat...
...Having psychoanalyzed your adversary (whom you never saw in your life), drag in the names of some good people to show the red hunters at times were unfair, dead wrong, and therefore always were...
...Joe McCarthy, for whom Communism was never an issue until Feb...
...Dead right about the Communists...
...According to this logic, if we admit cancer to be a threat, then we must admit that Dr...
...In all Mr...
...Liberals would serve our country better if they gave up these vituperative hysterics and quit trying to block the current investigation...
...I have been against Communists all my life—and I have fought against them a good deal longer than most of Mr...
...But to conclude from this that Martin Dies was, in Mr...
...Forgive me that I do not swallow it whole...
...Only a sucker would buy it...
...if they helped honest men who merit help, with a kick now and then for secret Communists who merit that...
...His ranting and demagogy set back at least a decade the cause of anti-Communism—a cause to which I have always been devoted...
...And Dillard Stokes thinks that Martin Dies was "dead right about the Communists...
...As Victor Lasky and Ralph de Toledano relate the story (and Mr...
...A Communist-front organization...
...what...
...This may strike Dillard Stokes as being "dead right about the Communists...
...Stokes writes as if no one had done anything about the Communists until McCarthy and Nixon came along...
...From our viewpoint, McCarthy is very much a Joe-come-lately in this fight...
...Does Mr...
...Does the professor personally know all the faculty members in the country...
...Stokes' trouble is that he seems to believe of McCarthy, Jenner, and Velde what he believes of Dies—that they are all genuinely motivated by a desire to detect Communists...
...when...
...It was not popular to take that position then, as both Mr...
...Greenglass...
...As for the colleges: Mr...
...But we red-baiters won—-and won fairly...
...1, 1943, when he listed 38 government officials, who, he said, should be immediately discharged from public service...
...As for the rest of his article, it is vitiated by the same joy in self-flagellation...
...I am all in favor of those who "identify" Communists and Communist influence...
...McCarthy...
...Real danger is what I said and what I meant...
...this had been done within our traditional framework of debate and exposure...
...His ambition was not to uncover the Stalinist conspiracy in the United States but to destroy the New Deal...
...J. R. Brinkley is "dead right," and we must all turn to goat glands...
...Some of them worked for the government in the Thirties and Forties...
...Stokes' Rejoinder ARTHUR SCHLESINGER'S comment on my article is just the brand of liberal "argument" I had in mind...
...Let us first examine Mr...
...by the clandestine character of their operations and by the cynical denial of party affiliation...
...So Prof...
...When an issue comes up, low rate certain public figures, call them scatterbrained, tell what they believe and how they tick, talk fast, do a job on whoever brought up the matter, hint he's close to the paper doll stage, and make cute cracks about "adoring words," "canonization," "masochism," and "self-flagellation...
...During the 1952 campaign he served on Adlai Stevenson's staff and was singled out for smear treatment by Sen...
...The "Subversive Activities" were those of the Union for Democratic Action, an anri-Communist organization, founded explicitly on the conviction that Communists had no place in the liberal movement (and the predecessor, of course, of the anti-Communist Americans for Democratic Action...
...The greatest fraud perpetrated on the American people in recent years is McCarthy's success in persuading some of them that nothing was done about Communism until he came along...
...All quoted phrases from "The U. S. Communist Party," by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Life, July 29, 1946...
...Stokes does not attempt to defend most of the untenable positions he took in his original article—that Martin Dies was "dead right" about the Communists, for example...
...Liberals ought never to have regarded them as anything else...
...At bottom, Mr...
...But, given the extent of Communist infiltration, it seemed to me imperative for liberals to lose no time in identifying and exposing Communist influences in our midst...
...Schelsinger in Life...
...He used to be a newspaperman...
...Instead, he concentrates on an attempt to prove that the Communists in our colleges today constitute a "real danger" to American security...
...What in the world is he talking about...
...McCarthy's anti-Communism, like Stalin's anti-Fascism, is demagogue's bait designed to fuel his own drive for power...
...Or which are secret Communists...
...Stokes would be hard put to dismiss them as pro-Communist writers), "Levine furnished sufficient evidence to Martin Dies, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, to warrant a full-scale investigation...
...Bella V. Dodd, once a party national officer, testified, "The Communist teacher . . . must not only make himself an agent of the class struggle, he must indoctrinate other teachers in the class struggle, and he must see that their students are indoctrinated...
...In order to meet that threat, he suggests we must support Jenner and Velde in their investigations...
...Stokes evidently thinks that there is an overwhelming threat—'a real danger'—to American security today arising out of our colleges and universities...
...Stokes' new friends—and I propose to fight the McCarthys and Veldes too, and for pretty much the same reasons...
...It strikes me as a lot of retroactive self-flagellation by Dillard Stokes...
...there was little to fear from Communist political activities or Communist ideas...
...The proof...
...As the professor must—or should —know, "the party works both through secret members and through fellow travelers...
...let him answer the stock questions—who...
...As to what they are up to: Granville Hicks testified, "What the party is looking for, it seems to me, is simply . . . dependable agents of the Soviet Union...
...I have always been a red-baiter, and I am proud of it...
...Of course, Communists and fellow-travelers should be excluded from all places where they can harm the national security, such as the government service or secret work under government contract...
...Stokes' apologies to Martin Dies are surely carrying liberal self-hatred a little far...
...or, if we conclude peace to be wonderful, then we must forever after confide our destinies to Father Divine...
...He says ". . . there are a negligible number of Communists today on college faculties and . . . they present very little danger to students except of killing them by boredom...
...Stokes must—or should— know, there are a negligible number of Communists today on college faculties, and they present very little danger to students except of killing them by boredom...
...I did not say it arises out of the colleges, but out of the secret Communists in the colleges...
...Any Communist who is convicted of a crime or who seeks to indoctrinate students inside or outside the classroom should, of course, be dismissed...
...Stokes really think that the readers of The Progressive should clasp hands with Joe McCarthy rather than with Jimmy Wechsler...
...Taft that he hardly represents so terrible a threat to the nation as to justify a revision of our tradition of academic freedom...
...Schlesinger now says: "Mr...
...I have done my share of this myself, and plan to continue doing it wherever I can...
...Marzani, Mr...
...Stokes takes an either-or view of the world...
...The great trouble about Martin Dies— and I thought so then, as I think so now—is that he was not in any serious sense anti-Communist...
Vol. 17 • September 1953 • No. 9
