Naive Compassion
Baldwin, Roger
Naive Compassion My Native Grounds, the Autobiography of Royal W. France. Cameron Associates, 255 pp., $3.75. Reviewed by Roger Baldwin The claim to public attention of this crusading lawyer's...
...WILLIAM McCANN reports regularly on paperbacks...
...His admiration for personal idealism and courage transcends his reservations, and as attorney for the defense he ignores political subjection and fanaticism...
...ROGER BALDWIN is former executive director and now international adviser of the American Civil Liberties Union...
...Reviewed by Roger Baldwin The claim to public attention of this crusading lawyer's story of defense of the Communist under-dogs is the rare combination of a burning faith in civil liberties everywhere with its practical application only to Communists...
...His heart goes out to accused Communists, while his principles recoil from their subservience to Russia...
...from a long and comfortable career as economics professor in Florida, France, at almost seventy years of age, gave it up to volunteer his rusty legal skills to Communist defendants in New York...
...Aroused by McCarthyism in 1951 THE REVIEWERS RICHARD SCHICKEL is an assistant editor of Look magazine...
...There's no hypocrisy in it: France specializes because other lawyers refused their services...
...The story is arresting, but more intriguing is a compassion so inclusive as to appear naive...
...If he elects to devote his last years to the left, now as secretary of the National Lawyers Guild, it is not as a blind partisan but as one who conceives a lawyer's duty lies where the under-dogs need it most...
...he edited the paperback, "Ambrose Bierce's Civil War...
...But he was fired by indignation over prosecutions for political opinion and associations, and the failure of lawyers to resist them...
...He had never met a Communist, and he was no fellow-traveler...
...WILLIAM L. NEUMANN teaches history at Goucher College...
...France loves everybody who fights against repression...
...Two-thirds of what purports to be an autobiography is the record of his Communist court cases after 1951 and his observations on events and people, mainly in New York...
...MILTON MAYER, a regular contributor to The Progressive, is co-author, with Mortimer Adler, of "Revolution in Education," to be published this month...
Vol. 22 • April 1958 • No. 4
