SEWER LIBERALISM'

...There are a few happy omens on the horizon, tiny specks of encouragement that may eventually rebuild the left and restore a dynamic, militant liberalism...

...He is afraid to stick to the ancient and honored principle, one that even the late Senator Taft embraced, that a teacher ought to be judged by what he teaches and how he acts, not by what he believes...

...Yet the same liberal fights for sewers and hydrogen bombs both, without seeing the contradiction...

...In politics, silver and gold make speeches— while silence is just plain silence...

...But if liberalism is to stand independently on its own feet, it cannot wait for its head to be wagged by a radical left tail...

...The liberal watchword on school integration was, to begin with, "moderation"—until the sewer liberals began counting noses and discovered that it was cheaper to lose the South than the Negro vote in the North...

...The article is entitled "Getting into Politics—or, the Way to Better Government...

...Even more— against militarism and its demand for conformity...

...On April 1, 1936, the New Republic sounded the clarion for a third party...

...Liberalism could consider itself a "pressure from the left," and it could part company with the outstanding "liberal" President of our time because it felt it had to press him leftward...

...You don't find that in the lexicon of the "sewer liberal" anymore...

...Call the roll...

...Their efforts were puny...

...Contrast this with the painful cry of liberalism in the halls of Congress today calling for an extra billion dollars for military aircraft...

...His feet are on the ground...

...Liberalism in the Thirties moved far to the left, fought the depression, militarism, fascism, and raised millions to aid the Spanish Republicans...

...Nowhere is it stated that above everything else the way to better government is sound principles...

...A high level of liberal politics indeed...

...Except for one or two Senators, on a few occasions, none has had the courage to vote against an appropriation for Senator McCarthy's infamous committee, or against putting Senator Eastland into the chairmanship of the committee dealing with civil rights...

...In the 1950's the pendulum was swung in the other direction...

...The same minimum wage law that is accepted by the citadels of conservatism, but covering some additional millions of employees, and perhaps raising the ante to $1.25 some time in the future...

...Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey, once regarded as spokesman for the extreme left of the liberals in our Senate, introduced so bad a bill seeking to outlaw the Communist Party a year or so ago that even Senator McCarthy flinched...

...There are, of course, individual exceptions, and one or two publications that still try to fly the flag...

...His head, he brags, is no longer in the clouds...

...Thus Georgia's Herman Talmadge, darling of all race-baiters and reactionaries, can unhesitatingly endorse Adlai Stevenson, the pin-up boy of the liberal eggheads...

...Stevenson did a fancy pirouette and Harriman got religion...

...The revolutionaries of that day berated the liberal because he did not advocate a new social order, and they predicted that he would join the war legions and reaction...

...Yet the gap between the liberal and the conservative was great then, so inflexible was the conservative in his total dedication to preserving the status quo...

...Roads...

...For the Modern Monthly we now have substituted two new publications—the quarterly Dissent, an independent socialist organ that includes such writers as Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Lewis Coser, Eric Fromm...

...It is for us not to berate, but to explore...

...But who speaks of "imperialism" today—except of course "Communist imperialism...

...It is amazing, however, how many liberals did not rally to our cause, how thin our ranks were, how many passed us by for fear of being compromised...

...It must look at itself, blemishes and all, in the mirror of its own lost principles—and then apply the cure of courage...

...The time is here to mount the soap-box, to find our voices, to drop our fears, to move the truth from the subconscious to the conscious, to stand up against con-formism...

...The same publication today has given its unqualified endorsement to the Presidential aspirations of another "liberal" who is far less amenable to "pressure from the left" than was Roosevelt, whose reactions to pressure, in fact, have been almost universally to the "moderate" right...

...I. F. Stone in his Weekly has called on "the left to break away from all Communist influence and strike out a new path determined in each country by its own conditions and traditions...

...LaFollette held out against war...

...So far as I know, no leading liberal today is asking for a "vote on war" or is vigorously defending the right of honest men to "dissent from armament policies or to decline to fight...

...The sewer liberal has bent to the conformity of our times...

...These are all fine things...

...Charles Beard, yesterday, could write a series of articles for«the New Republic calling for neutrality, speaking of "imperialism as a 'capitalist racket,'" and urging fellow-liberals "in time of peace [to] prepare for peace...

...Liberalism is under attack from the right...

...But he accepts, without a whimper of protest, the $45 billion military budget, and actually proposes additional hundreds of millions for bigger and better war-planes...

...He certainly wanted sewers, and social security, and work relief, and unemployment compensation...

...He was afraid of the Catholic vote in Illinois, despite the fact that many Catholics were courageously opposing McCarthyism...

...The tragedy of America is that it has no genuine left...

...Within the intelligentsia there is the same kind of rumblings that one noted in other days, when F. V. Calverton was publishing Modern Monthly and when maverick writers were exposing the "power elite" of yesterday...

...one against the many, his voice could not be silenced...

...Supplementing that effort, Francis Heisler and I established a similar committee in Chicago...

...Liberalism is modifying its course and moderating its proposals to the point where it merely asks for a little larger dose of the same medicine fed by conservatism...

...The rejoinders to his critical appraisal of American liberalism come from Senator Richard L. Neuberger, Oregon Democrat, and Gus Tyler, director of political education for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.—The Editors...

...And they arc unquestionably correct...

...The New Republic in 1936, for instance, fired away at those forces, like the United Mine Workers, who were "drifting back to Roosevelt...

...Admittedly the liberal has never been a revolutionary...

...Lens, who here kicks off for the critics, is a Chicago labor union official long on the firing line of progressive movements...

...He goes on supporting foreign aid programs which emphasize the military support of fascist or feudal societies in the Far East and ignore, for the most part, the compelling fact of social and economic revolution in the vast under-developed areas of the world...

...Labeling the Communists as "idiots" and "cowards," Stone's Weekly hopes for a re-groupment of the left on a genuine basis...

...British visitors have noted on a number of occasions that American liberalism is a few notches to the Right of the English Tories...

...Corliss Lamont...

...He was, in a real sense, merely a reformer-liberal in radical clothing...

...IN THOSE ancient days when the socialist movement was still a significant force in American life, a "sewer socialist" was a fellow who was willing to forget the ultimate goal of social ownership in favor of such mundane and immediate gains as sewers...

...failed to rebuke "the numerous admirals and generals who are daily attacking all who work for peace and charge every peace-lover with being a craven 'Red' in the pay of Moscow...

...It is terrorized by such vague epithets as "creeping socialism...

...One read then from the pen of Harry F. Ward that "liberalism is having a hard time . . . Politically it is being pushed out of the picture . . . Because the existing order can not be maintained, the conservatives become either reactionaries or reformers, belated recruits to the dwindling army of liberals...

...Yesterday's liberals were no respecters of high office...

...Truman, who initiated this disgrace...

...But before he became a sewer liberal he dreamed bold dreams of a New Freedom, a New Deal...

...In the more "civilized" present Reinhold Niebuhr can think of nothing more dissenting than the concept: "Until real disarmament is achieved, we cannot afford the illusion that security can be had at cut-rate terms . . . Our strategy must embrace everything from imaginative technical and economic assistance programs to the latest developments in atomic weapons . . ." Intoxication with "atomic weapons" has spread from the brass-hats to the eggheads...

...Dulles espouses, complete with NATO, the $45 billion defense budget, airbases around the world, but just a little more for economic aid...

...The fact that basic civil liberties were being tossed overboard along with the Communists did not seem to bother the Senator...

...Senator Paul Douglas, a man of unimpeachable integrity and a long history of liberalism, whose voice once rang with a passionate plea for a third party, could not bring himself in his last campaign to denounce McCarthy-ism...

...A few weak liberal voices today attack the un-American "internal security" program...

...He's a "practical" fellow these days...

...Oswald Garrison Villard, writing in The Nation, undoubtedly expressed the feeling of liberalism's legions in the Thirties when he said: "The fact is that we are preparing for war as never before in the ridiculous belief that preparedness means safety from war...

...Emergence of such a left would, of course, shift the center of gravity of liberalism away from "sewers...

...And to the extent that the left could grow, the pendulum of liberalism would also change course...

...The money you give long in advance can be budgeted—and therefore spent more intelligently...

...Wendell Willkie once defended a Communist before the Supreme Court without charge...

...The time is here for a rededica-tion of American liberalism (and the American left...

...We have yet to see either rebuked for these hesitancies in the same terms that the New Republic criticized Roosevelt back in the Thirties...

...Thus when Cecil Hinshaw, in the pages of The Progressive, called for a pacifist solution, a respectable liberal like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., found this thesis "boring . . . stupid . . . noble, if idiotic...

...But win what...

...But whether communists or fellow-travelers ought to be permitted to teach such "sensitive" subjects as mathematics—here he shows a cowardly hesitancy...

...The tug of war has gone against us long enough...

...One hydrogen bomb will erase more sewers in one minute than sewer liberalism can secure in four Presidential campaigns...

...To the new conformist "sewer liberal" this is nothing short of heresy...

...The witch-hunt, he says, has gone too far...

...Such attacks helped to polarize liberalism away from "sewers" to the more fundamental problems of the day...

...Liberalism has now drawn so close to conservatism that the two are indistinguishable...

...If it had been in existence to canalize the political floods loosened by this depression, the nation would probably have made a long step forward toward an intelligent economy...

...But he had no fear of fighting for social ownership of certain means of production, or advocating a third party, or lambasting Roosevelt for "war preparations...

...What does 1956 sewer liberalism want...

...foreign policy and a study of the American labor movement...

...The New York Post's liberal editor, James Wechsler, criticizes the government for its persecution of the legless veteran, James Kutcher, who was fired from an innocuous job eight years ago for his Trotskyism...

...But what sewer liberal has had the courage even to ask for a passport for Dr...

...What distinguishes them from yesterday's liberals is their unwillingness to come to grips with anything more important than the symbolic sewer...

...As the reactionaries and radicals swing into action there is not left room enough between them for the liberals...

...He is the author of several books on U.S...

...Liberalism has lost its ardor, its courage, its idealism...

...Eisenhower endorses, but for lower age limits for women...

...Whatever the merit of that taunt, the liberal did not flinch from playing his minority role on basic social issues...

...A "sewer socialist" always wound up forgetting about socialism and remembering only the sewers...

...But who among the liberals have dared criticize Harry S. Truman for his initiation of that security program...

...not to accuse but to review...

...Several years ago when Spanish workers in Barcelona were imprisoned for organizing strikes, Norman Thomas set up a committee to aid the labor victims of Franco Spain...

...He dare not attack it head on...

...Under the circumstances the pull is to the right...

...Otherwise, just as surely as sewer socialism has been obliterated from our social scene and merged with tepid liberalism, so will sewer liberalism be blended into "middle-of-the-road" conservatism...

...Unfortunately they are the majority of the "liberal" breed...

...Roosevelt not only tolerates this but more than any other President has strengthened the hand of these intolerant un-American militarists...

...The amorphous non-Communist Left is clearing its throat...

...Official liberalism has yet to rebuke the Senator from Minnesota for his attempt to out-McCarthy McCarthy...

...No one was safe from their indignant pens...

...The earlier the better...

...Here is a sample from the pen of Gus Tyler of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, in the Voting Guide 1956 prepared by Americans for Democratic Action: "Consider making a contribution, however modest, to organizations whose aims you approve...

...Just ring that bell, type that card, get that vote out—glory hallelujah...

...Not for them the grim confrontations of the perils of war, the shame of McCarthyism, the tyranny of the security program...

...Eisenhower is for $2 billion in foreign aid, the liberal is for $4 billion...

...Lower income taxes in the lower brackets...

...and the monthly Liberation, revolving primarily around the venerable Gandhian pacifist, A. J. Muste, but with an even more imposing list of contributors and editors...

...In that distant epoch, the dimly-lit Thirties, a liberal was not a communist, nor even a socialist, but he had convictions against war, an absolute antipathy to militarism, a crusading zeal against imperialism, a devotion to social progress, and an unqualified endorsement of civil liberties and civil rights which did not decline in the face of pleas for "moderation...

...I say this with no rancor, nor even condemnation—because history is full of these failures of courage and waves of conformity...

...What about the passion of your message, the dream of a better tomorrow, the refusal to yield principle to expediency...

...What liberals have had the courage to demand an investigation of the passport situation or the Kutcher case or the relationship between army generals and big business...

...All this has changed strikingly in recent years...

...Our liberals today want no part of basic issues...

...It was the courts and such conservatives as Harry Cain that spoke out while Paul Douglas was currying the Catholic vote and Hubert Humphrey was out-baiting the authors of the Smith Act...

...Even as a minority it would have exerted salutary pressure from the left...

...Peace has been preempted by the communists, and no "sewer liberal" uses the word anymore except to denote that we will achieve peace by preparing our "military defense...

...He disagrees with the conservative only on quantity, not quality...

...Villard in the Thirties criticized Roosevelt because F.D.R...

...Liberalism in the Fifties has moved so far to the right that it seeks nothing but "more of the same...

...Sewers...

...But how often does Wechsler—how often do other "sewer" liberals—point out that it was the attorney-general of their friend and ally, Mr...

...In the field of internal security most liberals are still far behind the conservative former Senator Harry Cain...

...The same social security program that Mr...

...Instead of breaking with those whose deeds repudiate genuine liberalism, the liberal forgives and forgets—and covers up...

...In that great long ago, Villard wrote: "Even the governments which sincerely protest that they want peace above all else refuse to allow their people to vote upon war, to dissent from armament policies, or to decline to fight...

...Compare that approach with today's...

...They composed the rearguard, not the vanguard...

...The emphasis today is on efficiency and the doorbell...

...It berated Roosevelt for "talking generalities" without substance...

...on the contrary they bring war nearer...

...It is clear that today we do have "sewer liberals...

...Yet few liberals are outraged by the corrupting influence of this massive machine and its propaganda...

...he skirts around it...

...Silver and gold make speeches...

...A number of liberals joined with us, and some have since been plagued by security investigations and passport difficulties...

...Like the left, it too has disappeared...

...It said: "Such a national party [representing workers and farmers] is, in our opinion, long overdue in this country...

...They didn't carry a father image, neon-lighted, in their breast pocket...

...The prosperity of the last fifteen years, largely sustained, incidentally, by the military expenditures, has cut the ground from under our left...

...If Mr...

...Teachers certainly ought not to be fired for refusing to sign test oaths...

...Give out early with the talk and money...

...Pacifists and conscientious objectors are living an isolated life these days, subject to the taunts not only of the men in power but the sewer liberals as well...

...We used to hear passionate voices raised against war...

...There was no such political animal as a "sewer liberal" in that period because a liberal was presumed to be nothing but a mild reformer anyway, one whose goals were limited to moderate change within the prevailing system...

...The record shows that the progress that has been made against McCarthyism has been achieved without much help from the "sewer liberals...

...During the Thirties liberalism had been under attack from the communist, socialist, and assorted left...

...In years gone by there was a group of liberals like Borah, LaFollette, Norris, La Guardia, who spoke their minds no matter how unpopular the cause or how badly they were defeated...

...But how important are they really...

...It could speak out against war—in a day when war budgets were only a few paltry hundred millions...

...What liberal today denounces preparedness as a "ridiculous belief...

...In a world threatened by war and not rid of economic collapse the time left in which to educate and mobilize opinion for necessary changes may be shorter than people think...

...It stated categorically that what we need is "pressure from the left...

...He is "out to win...

...But the trend and the over-all look are unmistakeable...

...Who can afford to talk of "peace," as did the late Charles Beard...

...Liberalism must abandon the moral principles of conservatism, must promote a philosophy that differs from conservatism in essence, not just in numbers...

...The closer you get to Election Day, the less the voter believes...

...That was in an era when half a billion dollar defense budget was big money...

...And the egghead who doubts this devotion to arms opens himself to rasping charges of "anti-anti-communism," "fellow-traveling," and the like...

...The liberal has become a con-former, an anti-dissenter...

...It is time to pull the other way...

...Senator Humphrey's legislation was presumably introduced to cut the ground from under the right-wing "anti-Communists," to make liberals seem even more anti-Communist than the professional anti-Communists...

...The Tories accept many social measures in England, such as national health insurance and nationalized industry, which sewer liberalism in the United States is slow to advocate...

...It is no longer liberalism but a left-wing of American conservatism...

...Armaments," said yesterday's liberal, "are bleeding the world white, yet guarantee no peace...

...The sewer liberal has become a fellow-traveler of the military, thinking parallel thoughts with the Pentagon as both drive on for "containment" of communism...

...The liberal of that day ceaselessly investigated and exposed...

...and the pull has dragged American liberalism rightward...

...The air is so filled with the din of charge and counter-charge that he closes both his eyes and ears...

...No Tory would whitewash the Truman-initiated witch-hunt...

...The same "bi-partisan" foreign policy that Mr...

...The Communist movement has disoriented our left...

...Instead of "thunder from the left" the "sewer liberal" today accommodates himself to the right...

...Others will follow later this year and in 1957...

...Today the military spends $45 billion a year, owns $124 billion in property, and employs 1,170,000 civilians in addition to its three million soldiers...