WHEN YOU CALL ME A LIBERAL, SMILE

Rodell, Fred

When You Call Me A Liberal, Smile By FRED RODELL ISEE by the papers that those great liberals, Senators Ball. Burton, and Hatch, three out of four of the touted B2H2 backfield that so short a time...

...And their interest in the welfare of the common man, in Delhi or Detroit, in Chungking or Chicago, is just as great as it has always been...
...That was the time when, despite the Administration's desperate efforts to make the nation war-minded and war-willing, a sizeable majority of the American people remained, right up to the end, opposed to our going to war...
...And of course— if I may now stop singing falsetto—this is so much utter nonsense, even though it is the unvarnished and inescapable implication of much that passes as intelligent "liberal" comment on affairs in this, our time...
...Or so say PM and The New Republic...
...Burton, and Hatch, three out of four of the touted B2H2 backfield that so short a time ago was saving the world from the U. S. Senate and the U. S. Senate from itself with a rip-snorting Resolution that sounded mighty pretty but didn't mean much, have taken the field again, minus their left half-back, to try to save the nation from U. S. labor and U. S. labor from itself with a little bill subtly designed to weaken the Wagner Act, knock holes in the Norris-La Guardia Act...
...And Senators Ball, Burton, and Hatch, with their B2H1 bill to bust labor...
...We liberals, in the old sense, have some mighty tough fights ahead of us...
...Regardless of how they got there, the "liberal" publications were lined right up with Henry Luce and the New York Herald-Tribune...
...How do you now like your fairly newfound fraternity brothers—for all their still being able to give you the old internationalist grip...
...These, then, were tb# new "liberals": the Tories of the South, probably the nearest approach to a crew of native fascists (outside of the crack-pot fringe") that the nation has produced...
...The third group was the most important and the most influential...
...It was just as simpleas that...
...Their concern was not in the slightest degree for the welfare of the United States...
...They supported, en masse, every Administration measure that brought us closer to war...
...How will you enjoy supporting Senator Bilbo, Sidney—Senator Bilbo, the Mississippi mountebank who spewed out anti-Semitic, anti-Negro slon for hours during his filibuster against the FEPC...
...And these are our liberals...
...It is not enough to say that they were the powers-that-be in the world of money and hence in the worlds of publishing and radio and hence in the molding, or twisting, of public opinion—but they were...
...That was the time when the great interventionist-isolationist debate was in full swing...
...Great liberals all...
...Now then, isn't it about time to climb back to some semblance of sanity...
...They are three comparatively hack politicians, none of them very bright or very brave or very bursting with zeal to give their legislative all for the welfare of the common man...
...and generally make employers drool with delight—and so help me, I don't know whether to laugh or to weep...
...Suppose we go back to the beginning, the couple of years preceding Pearl Harbor...
...the Commies and their comrades, probably the only group in the country that is literally more loyal to another nation than to the United States...
...It is also the hardest to define...
...Courtesy of PM and The New Republic, of Time and the New York Herald-Tribune, of Sidney Hillman and Walter Winchell, of every publication and every person whose single-minded, simple-minded standard, for some years past, has equated liberalism with internationalism and damned the daylights out of every doubter or dissident...
...And of course, by the same token, such men as Bob La Follette, Charles Beard, Norman Thomas, are way outside the liberal pale because they opposed war before Pearl Harbor and have since refused to give their blind and blanket blessing to any and every international plan...
...and the financial-social rulers of the Eastern roost, probably the most effective opponents over the years of every measure that has subordinated the rights of money to the rights of men...
...What they wanted was war...
...Their concern was for Russia, their intellectual and emotional fatherland...
...They were all these things and something more...
...And that was the time when almost every allegedly liberal publication—with a very few honorable exceptions, notably The Progressive and Common Sense—suddenly dreamed up a new narrow test of liberalism: Are you or aren't you for getting into the war ? The Nation reached that position gradually...
...And it is precisely these same groups that have more recently formed the driving force behind the move for a high-wide-and-handsome internationalism...
...Far from it...
...And so says Sidney Hillman, who has threatened to throw the weight of his powerful PAC, at the next elections, in favor of all who voted right on the issues of war and a wonderful new world order and against all those who anywhere voted wrong...
...It is not enough to say that they were the Wall Street crowd and their wives and their financial or social satellites—but they were...
...Then, there were the Communists and the pear-Communists...
...They hopped the band-wagon Jate but they raised a terrific racket once they got aboard,1 and their influence was out of all proportion to their numbers...
...Think of them carefully in connection with the word "liberal...
...Liberal," for instance...
...It would help quite a lot if we could learn to distinguish our enemies from our friends...
...And isn't it almost time to re-define a few terms...
...THEY were Henry Stimson and James Wadsworth, they were Wendell Willkie, yes, and Franklin Roosevelt, they were the directors of the Chase National and the overseers of Harvard, they were Walter Lipp-man and Nicholas Murray Butler, they were Long Island and the Stock Exchange and the Yale Club and Trinity Parish...
...Those great liberals, Tom Lamont and Tom Connally, Donald Nelson and Nelson Rockefeller, Ed Stettinius and Earl Browder...
...the best friend labor has in the Senate today...
...PM was practically born into it...
...You got your war and you're going to get your new League of Nations all wrapped up in red...
...There were the Southern Democrats...
...And their women-folk—knittin' away for Britain...
...And of course, the word "liberal" has taken on a new and more worldly meaning so that the stands men take on domestic issues, the values they work and fight for on the home front (as well as abroad), the qualities of mind and heart and guts that drive them, all these can be pretty much ignored...
...Think it over, you "liberal" dailies and weeklies and columnists and commentators...
...You remember what "democracy" means...
...What say you, Bruce Bliven and Max Lerner and the rest...
...THE fact is that Senators Ball...
...It is interesting and instructive to look back at the composition of what might be called the war party, the interventionists...
...white, and blue ribbons...
...How will you enjoy opposing Bob La Follette...
...Ever hear of one of them knitting for the U. S. share-croppers...
...They were the Right People...
...Those great liberals...
...It is not enough to say that they were the Anglophiles of the Eastern seaboard—but they were...
...and though they shoved their way into front seats on the band-wagon headed down the international glory road with that B2H2 business, their past records on more important and somewhat tougher matters show that their new anti-labor bill is not out of character...
...Burton, and Hatch are about as liberal as your old Aunt Nellie...
...They supported these measures for one reason alone: Lincoln freed the slaves and Lincoln was a Republican...
...It was made up in the main of three groups...
...Senator Wagner not excepted ? How will you enjoy, when the time comes, hacking Senators Ball and Burton and Hatch, and what will you tell your door-bell pushers to say in answer to embarrassing questions about that anti-labor bill of theirs ? * * * THINK it over, Sidney...
...the New Republic, long staunchly anti-war, suddenly turned its coat and many of its readers' stomachs at the strong "request" of its financial sponsors...

Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 30


 
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