Two on Communists
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr.
Two on Communists The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919-1957), by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser. Beacon Press. 593 pages. $6.75. Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America...
...Hoover appears to forget is what Justice Jackson wisely reminded us—"The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion...
...We have chosen not to deal with these matters," Howe and Coser write, "not because they are unimportant—they certainly deserve treatment by other writers—but because we have had to submit ourselves to the usual limitations of space, time, interest, and competence...
...But the underlying thrust of its argument is that Communism is a disease of atheists and intellectuals, produced by lack of "faith" rather than by social and economic frustration...
...Browder, C minus, and so on...
...Thus on Debs: he "sensed the ritual uses of lonely anger and embodied in himself the need men have for a symbolic agent to bear the agonies of their time," by which the authors appear to mean that Debs' oratory relieved the pent-up feelings of some in his audience...
...On the other hand, the book is also marred by a variety of gratuitous attitudes on the part of its authors...
...Hoover will write (my italics), "We need to show our young people, particularly those endowed with high intellects, that we in our democracy need what they have to offer...
...The chapters on "The Intellectuals Turn Left" and "The Popular Front" are brilliant...
...The first part of the book is a shallow and lacklustre account of the origins of Communism...
...It is patronizing, know-it-all, and filled with infinite wisdom after the event...
...Indeed, it is often hard to detect in these pretentious pages the Irving Howe of that admirable book Politics and the Novel...
...The Howe-Coser book, by presenting Communism as an enormously supple, powerful, and fluid phenomenon, a movement as well as a conspiracy, gives us some sense of the dimensions of the Communist threat...
...Surely the issue between ourselves and the Communists is not whether we believe in God or not, but whether we believe in freedom under law or not...
...For one thing, Communist literature evidently exerts a hypnotic effect even on its critics, carrying a stylistic contagion no matter how anti-Communist the stance of the writer...
...This sound insight might have provided the basis for a valuable analysis...
...His picture of the Communist movement is rigid and mechanical...
...This is a fairly trite statement in this age of piety, but it surely deserves a little more examination than it has had...
...Those who try to make agnostics and atheists into some sort of third-class citizens are not only falsifying the American tradition of liberty...
...And many supporters of Communism, illogical as it may seem, do believe in a supernatural order, not only in such Catholic countries as Italy and France but throughout Asia...
...It has suggestive insights about Stalinism, but the theory is derived far too much from the American experience and explains all too little about Stalinism in France or Italy, not to mention about Stalinism in Asia...
...Howe and Coser reproduce all too implacably the abstract bureaucratic jargon of the Stalinists whom they so profoundly detest...
...Sometimes his own data contradict his theory...
...Thus Mr...
...What Mr...
...This trivial book would hardly have won such glowing notices if it had not been signed by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation...
...J. Edgar Hoover's book has one advantage over the Howe-Coser work: it treats the phenomena of Communist espionage and underground activity...
...If Howe and Coser err by ignoring the conspiratorial aspects of Communism, Mr...
...For one thing, it is evidently factually erroneous...
...A concluding essay, "Toward a Theory of Stalinism," is stimulating but terribly unfinished...
...There follows a workmanlike middle section on Communist methods and activities...
...thus the authors enact TVA in 1935, call Major George Berry of the Pressmen "Jack Berry of the AFL Printers," and write grotesquely exaggerated sentences like: "For several years guerrilla warfare tore up some of the American campuses...
...Hoover's authority and responsibility, his broad picture of the conflict with Communism is of particular interest...
...Foster, A for spirit and C for execution...
...For all its dogmatism of tone, it shows limited knowledge about the United States outside the radical orbit...
...Hoover misunderstands the American tradition when he writes, "The very essence of our faith in democracy and our fellow man is rooted in a belief in a Supreme Being...
...Holt...
...He believes that the essential issue between the Communists and ourselves is belief in God...
...Certainly the study of American prison-ers-of-war who succumbed to Communist brainwashing in Korea does not substantiate this generalization...
...but Mr...
...And, where freedom guarantees the right to believe or disbelieve in God, belief in God by no means guarantees civil or intellectual freedom...
...And the book is not helped by a portentous theoretical vocabulary...
...It is well-researched, shrewd, acute, and knowing...
...The Constitution of the United States is a notably secular document and has resisted the sporadic efforts of pious citizens to amend it by inserting the word "God...
...The Howe-Coser book is incomparably superior...
...The Hoover book, by reducing everything to cops-and-robbers terms, has the paradoxical effect of diminishing the very danger it tries so hard to evoke...
...The prose rhythms of Messrs...
...On what basis does the head of the FBI suppose that bright children are more vulnerable to Communism than stupid ones...
...Since this is so, it is surely freedom itself and not "compulsory godliness" (in Justice Jackson's excellent phrase) for which we are fighting...
...They describe the student movement of the thirties as "a training ground for liberals, intellectuals, and trade-union leaders—in short, for part of a new American elite, the articulate spokesmen and representative figures of postwar society"—a ridiculous statement when so few people who engaged in that student movement have ever been heard of since...
...374 pp...
...Hoover can see nothing else...
...Given Mr...
...Hoover concludes with his own prescription on how America can stay free...
...Conspiracy, in short, is an organic part of the Communist story...
...Thus he can write: "The Communist official in our country realizes that his supporters often form a motley collection, varying greatly in loyalty: some are fanatically loyal...
...Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, by J. Edgar Hoover...
...Many anti-Communists do not believe in God at all...
...This is the only advantage Hoover's Masters of Deceit enjoys over The American Communist Party...
...There are good things everywhere along the way...
...I don't mean to suggest that these two works are on the same level...
...For the rest, it is a paste-up job, superficial in its history, superficial in its analysis of the appeal of Communism, superficial or worse in its own basic philosophy...
...many more do not believe in Mr...
...he sees a static, changeless intrigue, impervious to the storms of history, diabolically committed to a single permanent purpose...
...and, in confining themselves to its milder manifestations, Howe and Coser make their work not only factually but psychologically incomplete...
...HPhere seems to be something about J- Communism which drags most books about it down to its own dreary level...
...they are performing a great disservice to genuine religion...
...Hoover, even wanted to remove the phrase "In God We Trust" from our coins...
...For all its defects, it is clearly the best one-volume history of the American Communist Party...
...While they are correct in arguing that Communism is not just a conspiracy, the fact remains that conspiracy is the psychological essence of Communism, and that the sadism and masochism implicit in conspiracy are often basic sources of the Communist appeal...
...Hoover does not permit it for a moment to disturb his fundamental vision of the Communist movement as a phalanx of disciplined and reliable traitors...
...Masters of Deceit has some useful language about protecting the rights of individuals and fighting Communism by improving our democratic institutions...
...Reviewed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Many God-fearing nations have been authoritarian in their government...
...at the same time, they cover themselves by sporadic retreats into heavy Marxist irony of the three-dot sort (on the IWW—"most of its talk about sabotage was just . . . talk...
...They exhibit an occasional sentimental preference of a neo-Trotskyite sort for romantic revolutionaries without ever making a serious argument that such people had contact with reality...
...others are half-timers or 'single-nighters.' Many are 'tremblers,' needing constant encouragement, whereas some are just victims unwittingly caught in the Party net...
...and J. Edgar Hoover expresses his abhorrence of Communism in a banal rhetoric which, with the obvious changes, might have come straight from Pravda (thus the American Communist Party becomes the "lackey of Moscow...
...one almost sees Howe and Coser as schoolmasters grading their students in the art of revolution—Ruthenberg, B plus...
...Hoover's Presbyterian God...
...Theodore Roosevelt, probably as good an American as Mr...
Vol. 22 • August 1958 • No. 8
