SINCE YOU WENT AWAY, PHIL

...This gets us to the Number One Unmentionable, unless of course, you first take off your shoes, face to the East, and make the sign of the Sickle and Hammer...

...He says the question was prompted by the fact that Norman and Bill had suggested, also at a radio forum, that collaboration was a 2-way proposition and that, sensitive plant though he is, J— S— does play a bit rough at times...

...I know, however, that wherever you are right now, you have The Progressive handy, so I'm sending this to your own paper to tell you how glad we are to have you back and how proud we all are to be associated with you in the new battles to come...

...But somehow I have the sneaking notion that in spite of all these warnings you are going to say exactly as you please, Phil, like your brother and your father before you...

...Other newspapers which do not join the hallelujah chorus receive similar mail, though not quite so bitter as we get...

...That would mark you out as a softie right away and indicate that you are a secret sympathizer with the butchers of Buchenwald...

...Most Americans will probably find some way to struggle on, even if they are on the black books of Isvetzia, the Daily Worker, and PM...

...Naturally you won't go around talking about such quaintly outmoded things as human decency and brotherhood, and justice and the like...

...You know, of course, that you are all problems, presumably psychotic, who must first be feted and fussed over and then forgotten when it comes to the important decisions as to the future of the nation for which you fought...

...And they can understand too, how a nation dedicated to another way of life than the acquisitive, fighting for years with its back against the wall, to keep off the White wolves of capitalism, may view with justified suspicion any new attempts to form a cordon sanitaire on its borders...

...If you are caught mumbling about civil liberties or dictatorship or what's cooking in the Kremlin kitchen, right away you are declaring an all-out war on R--------a...

...Let's see, wasn't it Robert Sherwood who once wrote a play against war called Idiot's Delight, and then turned around and damned everyone who couldn't take a delight in it...

...They can understand and rejoice in the splendor of the collective surge out of feudalism which the old Bolsheviks led...

...It seems since you went away, that great, big country and its Top Tovarich have gone in for collective sensitivity...

...The local camaraderie are now fixing to renew the class struggle where they left off, and no doubt Eric Johnston, Thomas Lamont, and Frank Hague, all of whom were Tovariches only yesterday, will be chased back to the little red dog-house...

...These decisions are to be left to the Brains...

...What a lot of Americans cannot understand is how a nation which can rise to such heights, can also sink to such depths of diplomatic infantilism, petty bourgeois imperialism, and anti-Marxist dictatorship into which much of postwar Soviet policy has plunged...

...To understand how touchy is the whole situation, you must read over the letters in the People's Forum, demanding that the heads of Norman and Bill be rolled in the sawdust...

...They can see both good and bad in Soviet economy as they see both good and bad in our own...

...By which is meant the striped pants at San Francisco, the brief bags at Washington, and the typewriters of the well-kept and poorly-kept press...

...THUS Max Lerner in a recent PM (you've heard of that paper haven't you...

...Only this Spring, Arthur Garfield Hays and I were booed roundly by an audience of professional booers at a radio forum for mildly protesting against the jolly proposition that the working-classes of Germany be moved to that great, big country to the East of them to do forced labor for you know whom...

...Philip F. La Follette Madison, Wisconsin Dear Phil La Follette: IH0PE you are taking a little time off far away from run-o'-mine newspapers and their writers...

...It is a tribute to the thorough work of the various Impolitburos whence the majority of these letters flow that they have scared some editors, but not Morris, into a terrified silence about R----a which should please even the NKVD...

...And we're here to say that we are mighty happy to have you back to say it...

...ALSO there are certain things you are not allowed to mention...

...We had an uneasy feeling that this might be reviving a system which in our own country, at any rate, had been abolished around 1865, but it seems that there is a difference between "forced labor" and chattel slavery, and besides no one in our audience had ever heard of Wendell Phillips, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Lloyd Garrison, or the rest of those old fogies...

...They begin by saying that the writer is no Communist, Heaven forbid...

...I warn you, Colonel, not to let anyone overhear you suggesting that in the long run the prospects for enduring peace might not be enhanced by enslaving the entire population of Germany or exterminating the entire population of Japan...

...They can see how Soviet economic planning and scientific research, with private profit eliminated, can be the road to freedom and not the road to serfdom as the ineffable Hayek would have us think...

...OF course these fatuous attempts to impose censorship, cartelize "liberalism," a la PM, to lay down "lines," will snap back as they always do in the faces of the impostors...

...J— S— has become a male Alice Ben Bolt, who weeps with delight when you give him a smile and has you written up in Isvetzia when you don't...

...In the opinion of Max, and in view of the delicate state of the Unmentionable's nerves, this is tantamount to a declaration of war...

...While we're on the subject of idiocy, I expect you and the rest of the homecoming men, will be mildly amused at the attitudes of certain of our rear-eschelon civilian corps who have fought the good fight in the Stork Club...

...Even to those of us who haven't been away, the present ideological (2 dollars please) line is a bit confusing...

...While you were away earning your Legion of Merit, it told about your plot with Col.McCormick to do something sinister, the nature of which now escapes me) wants to know if Norman Thomas and William H. Chamberlin are rooting for an all-out war with R...

...Morris Rubin has been dutifully publishing every letter from indignant readers cancelling their subscriptions because The Progressive, is a venomous, war-mongering, Red-baiting sheet, since it publishes the writings of Norman and Bill...

...These letters all read so much alike that one is permitted to wonder whether or not they may be following a certain "line...

...Your letters kept us in close touch with your overseas doings, and while, of course, no one back here can ever know fully what you and the rest have been through, the dark hours of despair, the seemingly endless boredom, the revulsion against tragic waste and soul-shattering futility, still we could read between the cheerful lines, and resolve with you to have no more of this "idiot's delight" that is modern war...

...they then explain how the Red Army only went into the war to save New York, Madison, Wisconsin, and points West, and end by consigning the paper to an enduring perdition...