MEMO
MEMO from the Editor HATE MAIL Among the many letters addressed last month to the editors of The Progressive was one from a reader who took strong exception to Sidney Lens's reflections, in the...
...Fair enough...
...But we cling tenaciously, though perhaps quixotically, to the notion that it should be possible to take stands freely, independently, forthrightly, without being accused of depravity, corruption, or worse...
...No point in glossing over that, either...
...Our second and, we hope, wiser impulse was to leave the article as it was...
...We are afflicted with a fair portion of it on the Left...
...But the letter to which I refer called our editorial "the wildest and most vicious upside-down perversion I have ever seen," and went on to state: "The effect of what you have written is to trumpet the Soviet anti-Israel (and therefore anti-Jewish) line...
...Neither Roger Baldwin nor the ACLU as an organization covered themselves with glory in the period of which Peggy Dennis writes...
...Having reached that vicious conclusion, the letter-writer understandably canceled his subscription...
...Unfortunately, the minions of the Moral Majority and other forces on the Right seem to have no monopoly on mean-spirited intolerance...
...Also in last month's mail was a letter from a subscriber—one of several—who objected to our August comment, "Peace Postponed," which dealt with the Israeli air raid on a nuclear installation in Iraq...
...The letter-writer who took issue with Sidney Lens did all those things, but he also did something more: Gratuitously and scur-rilously, he asserted that our Contributing Editor "may be an agent of the CIA...
...Though he had once been widely denounced as a "radical" and "agitator," the obituaries were respectful and even laudatory...
...But even some of the congratulatory mail we receive is increasingly couched in terms I can't help but find offensive...
...In fact, a great deal of our mail comes from readers who object to something they have read in The Progressive and who want us (or one of our writers) to reconsider a position, retract a statement, revise an opinion...
...Our writers are not only permitted but encouraged to let their opinions show—because their opinions are of value, and because we believe readers are better served when a writer's views are candidly and openly presented than when they are slyly concealed and deceptively injected...
...1 seem to be seeing more and more letters of that ilk—letters from readers who are not content to state a position, but who also feel obliged to attack the good faith of anyone who disagrees with them...
...Peggy Dennis's article was completed, of course, some time before Roger Baldwin died...
...Longevity helps...
...Roger Baldwin, who founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 and had been a pillar of the Bill of Rights for more than six decades, died late in August at the age of ninety-seven...
...The Progressive deals in controversy, and we expect most readers to disagree at one time or another with something that appears in this magazine...
...Its first victims were not the leaders of the U.S...
...In a small triumph of demagoguery, our criticism of the Begin government was thus instantly transformed into subversion and anti-Semitism...
...There is no point in trying to gloss over that...
...Or must important questions be debated in terms of character assassination and rampant paranoia in order to demonstrate that we are serious about the views we hold...
...MEMO from the Editor HATE MAIL Among the many letters addressed last month to the editors of The Progressive was one from a reader who took strong exception to Sidney Lens's reflections, in the September issue, on the crisis in Poland...
...The letter-writer challenged none of Sid Lens's facts, but he did offer a wholly different analysis and interpretation of them...
...Would it strengthen your faith in a magazine to believe that it had knuckled under to pressure of any kind...
...In a time of heightened political tension, is it too much to expect a certain level of civility to be sustained in political dialogue...
...One of the joys of editing a magazine like The Progressive is that it makes no pretense of adhering to the sterile and phony "objectivity" that is the hallmark of the mass media...
...Am I being overly sensitive...
...Peggy Dennis, whose painful memoir of the Joe McCarthy years begins on Page 21 of this issue, recalls Roger Baldwin in another, less flattering light: She remembers him as one of the liberals whose principles did not withstand the pressure of the witchhunts...
...Among many letters applauding Sherry Matulis's poignant Last Word column in the August issue, "Abortion, 1954," for example, was one from a reader who said she was glad to see that The Progressive had caved in to feminist pressure, and added that her faith in the magazine had thereby been restored...
...It certainly wouldn't do much for my faith...
...Our writers' views, and ours, should certainly be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny and, where indicated, to the most vigorous challenge...
...The Smith Act, of which Peggy Dennis also writes, was passed in 1940...
...Communist Party but the leaders of the Trotsky-ite Socialist Workers Party, whose prosecution during World War II was cheered by the Communists...
...Our first impulse when we heard of his death was to delete those unflattering references in accord with the ancient dictum that one should speak no evil of the dead—or, at least, of the recently dead...
...We know, of course, that anything we publish about the Middle East from any perspective will bring passionate protests from some readers...
Vol. 45 • October 1981 • No. 10
