Decades of Deceit
By ARNOLD BEICHMAN
WILL there ever again be anything like the 'thirties and 'forties? I refer to those decades in which tens of thousands of Ameri- cans, Britons, Canadians, intellectuals all, will- ingly crusaded for a totalitarian faith in the name
of a morality which never existed. Middle-aged readers who lived through these decades of deceit v,ill be staggered by these two studies* because the nightmarish events they describe are so recent as to have been long forgotten, like the bridge at Remagen. To the young, the books by two American professors will seem unreal. They will find it difficult to believe that intelligent, famous, warm-blooded people could ever have accepted a Fiihrerprinzip out of conviction to a point when even espionage was countenanced. The indulgence towards Communist espionage among some American intellectuals existed even after it was uncovered. Technically, of course, it was a crime, but venial since its perpetration had been for a higher purpose. Thus a well- known psychologist, Anne Roe, wrote in The Making of a Scientist:
The scientists involved in espionage have been very few, indeed, and misguided as they may have been, they have acted on principle and not for personal gain. (My italics.) The Latham and Warren books, which complement each other, quite clearly prove the
very real influence and power which the Com- munist party, USA, at one time exercised upon large segments of the intelligentsia, in and out of government, during the New Deal. They appear at a time when some left liberals are engaged in a retrospective falsification of their history. Reviewing the two books in Book Week, Alan Barth, a Washington Post editorial writer, said that during the New Deal liberals were busy building labor unions and promoting racial equality and advancing social welfare;
and if the Communists wanted to tag along in these undertakings, most liberals were willing to let them. But in simple truth it was the Communists, not the liberals, who were the fellow-travellers in this arrangement.
Unfortunately that is not the simple truth. From 1936, when the CIO was established as a
breakaway from the AFL, until 1949, at least one-fifth of the CIO membership were in unions openly managed by Communist party members.
Not only was there little objection from left liberals to this manipulation of trade unions in the interests of 'proletarian internationalism,' but to expose it was regarded as tasteless 'Red- baiting.' What this sort of labour omnipotence meant was seen during the Nazi-Soviet Pact: Communist-controlled mass-production unions called major strikes in US defence plants while the one-time Fascist beasts were overrunning Western Europe and the Balkans and Britain stood alone.
From public records alone, Professor Latham shows that at least five centres existed in Washington 'for the collection and transmission of information to the Soviet Union'; that 'the complicity of an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Harry Dexter White, was charged under oath, and, although the charge was answered In a book after White's death, troublesome questions remain'; that 'the complicity of a
* THE COMMUNIST CONTROVERSY IN WASHING- TON: FROM THE NEW DEAL TO MCCARTHY. By Earl Latham. (Harvard/O.U.P., Ms.) LIBERALS AND COMMUNISM: THE 'RED DECADE' REVISITED, By Frank A. Warren 111. (Indiana Uni- versity Press, 52s. 6d.) White House administrative assistant, Lauchlin Currie, was also charged under oath, but although he did meet the charge, many ques- tions were unresolved.' Espionage activity went on in the Agriculture, State and Justice Depart- ments, the Office of Strategic Services, the National Labor Relations Board, the Board of Economic Warfare, the International Monetary Fund, the staffs of several Senate sub-committees and, naturally enough, the Government Printing Office. In virtually none of these cases were the spies Rudolph Abels, Ivanovs, professionals; they were party members who were recruited into the apparat; they were believers, not ex- ploitable homosexuals or libertines; they acted on principle and not for personal gain.
Professor Latham, head of the political science.
department Amherst College, says that Miss Bentley's 'main disclosures . . . are believable, are not to be brusquely dismissed as malicious mania, and are still largely unrefuted.' As for Chambers's testimony against Alger Hiss, writes Latham: The compulsion to disbelieve seems to be stimulated more by the fact that it is Hiss who is involved, than by the supposed deficiencies of the procedure that sent him to jail. If it were otherwise, the clamor for reform of the judicial process would be deafening because every day someone is convicted of crime on evidence quite as convincing as that in the Hiss case.
A particularly interesting chapter of the Latham book, one of a series about Com- munism in America sponsored by the Fund for the Republic, deals with the development by the American Congress of a tactic which Latham calls 'prescriptive publicity' and which Senator McCarthy exploited most successfully. Since pro- Communist organisations and their leaders couldn't be outlawed or jailed, the Congressional investigating committees exposed them—pre- scriptive publicity—creating such sanctions as 'social disapproval and whatever personal con- sequence (like loss of employment) that might follow public exposure.' The author points out, however, that 'the concept of prescriptive pub- licity did not originate with the conservatives of the 'forties and 'fifties but with the liberals of the 'thirties—still another of history's many depressing ironies.' Only in those happy days, prescriptive publicity was a justifiable weapon for exposing malefactors of great wealth.
Professor Warren, a historian at Queens College, New York, has read voluminously the liberal left periodical press of the 'thirties and a vast number of relevant books. His book raises the large question about the unending dependence by the liberal left upon `war socialism,' as distinct from democratic socialism, for its credo. Extinction of human values is tolerable in a 'socialist' society since one can be sure that things are always improving in what is really a People's Park of Culture and Rest. That Hungarians, East Ger- mans, Poles, Yugoslays, Tibetans, Ghanaians, Guyanians, Cubans, Indonesians, Chinese, Viet- namese abominate 'war socialism' and that they must be either walled in or terrorised into en- during it merely attests to the genuineness of the 'socialism' for which there are two funda- mental criteria—a permanent economic crisis which is always being solved by The Plan and a permanent state of war between the dictator- ship and the people, who in left liberal argot are called 'feudal' or 'middle-class elements.' Such was the 'simple truth' for the liberal left in the decades of deceit, as the Warren and Latham researches demonstrate, and so unhappily, it is today in the Swinging 'Sixties.
Previous page
