The Liberal Dilemma: The Pragmatic Tradition in the Age of McCarthyism 0367313421, 9780367313425

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Student vs. Student: Two Episodes
2 War by Other Means
3 Homer G. Richey and the Political Power of a Symbol
4 Mapping the Liberal Mind: Paul Wilson Sullivan
Conclusion: Vital Center or Excluded Middle?
Index

Citation preview

The Liberal Dilemma

This volume explores the response of liberals to right-wing attacks during the red scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, establishing it as a defensive approach aimed at warding off efforts to conflate liberalism with communism, but not at striking back at the opposing ideology of conservatism itself. This book finds the combination of the liberal adherence to pragmatism and political pluralism to have been responsible for the weakness of this response. Analyzing the language used in interchanges between right-wing anticommunists and liberals, Michaels shows that those interchanges did not constitute an effort to persuade but rather an effort to discredit the opponent as “un-American.” A variety of conflicts—a professor seeking to avoid dismissal by accusing his colleagues of disloyalty, an investigator of right-wing groups assailed for his activities, an openly communist student seeking to justify the existence of his student organization—embody a battle waged over conflicting versions of “America,” an attempt by each side to lay exclusive claim to that word. Conflicts over freedom, individualism, Americanism, and the institution of private property demonstrate how right-wing anticommunists and moderate liberals actually subscribed to two mutually incompatible patterns of sociation, making the conflict profound and resistant to reconciliation. Jonathan Michaels teaches history at the University of Connecticut, Hartford Campus.

Routledge Advances in American History

America’s Vietnam War and Its French Connection Frank Cain Famine Irish and the American Racial State Peter D. O’Neill The Disinformation Age The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States Eric Cheyfitz After American Studies Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera The White House and White Africa Presidential Policy Toward Rhodesia During the UDI Era, 1965–1979 Eddie Michel The Civil War and Slavery Reconsidered Negotiating the Peripheries Edited by Laura R. Sandy and Marie S. Molloy The Conservative Movement and the Vietnam War The Other Side of Vietnam Seth Offenbach The Liberal Dilemma The Pragmatic Tradition in the Age of McCarthyism Jonathan Michaels

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Advances-in-American-History/book-series/RAAH

The Liberal Dilemma The Pragmatic Tradition in the Age of McCarthyism

Jonathan Michaels

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Jonathan Michaels to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-31342-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31638-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Sylvie

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

viii 1

1

Student vs. Student: Two Episodes

21

2

War by Other Means

50

3

Homer G. Richey and the Political Power of a Symbol

93

4

Mapping the Liberal Mind: Paul Wilson Sullivan

163

Conclusion: Vital Center or Excluded Middle?

201

Index

256

Acknowledgments

This book first came into being as a dissertation, and so my first and most profound acknowledgement of a debt of gratitude must be to Professor Robert Asher, my graduate advisor, teacher, and friend. As an academic advisor, Bob always sent me in the somewhat unconventional directions that he knew I wanted to go; as a teacher, he brought me to books I needed to read and thoughts and ways and areas of thinking that I needed to explore; and as a friend, he tirelessly read, re-read, edited, and critiqued the material I sent him; he advised me, encouraged me, and ever so gently nudged me along, and even when it seemed that perhaps this dissertation might never actually take shape, if he was ever disappointed in me, I never felt it. My heartfelt thanks cannot be too strongly expressed. Thanks and gratitude are also due to my brother, Walter Benn Michaels, who helped immeasurably with the proposal that got this accepted as a book and who then read and commented on various chapters. My thanks also go to the Senior Editor at Routledge, Max Novick, who read the barest outline of a book and decided that it was worth taking on as part of Routledge’s Advances in American History series. The teachers under whom I studied as a graduate student all deserve and have my thanks. Some must be singled out as having had an individual effect on this particular piece of scholarship. Professor Fakhreddin Azimi generously allowed me free rein to explore the thinking of Antonio Gramsci and directed me to the work of Michael Freeden. Professor James Boster very kindly allowed me to work with him to explore the basic concepts that act as the basis of his field, cognitive anthropology; it was the notion of the “folk model” as opposed to the “specialist’s model” that inspired me to start exploring what the folk model of communism might be. Although that proved to be a dead-end for me, it led me to what proved to be the subject of this dissertation. Professor Kent Newmyer directed me to the work of Jennifer Nedelsky and her brilliant insights regarding the issues surrounding the relationship between the institution of private property and individuality. Dr. Carol Williams undertook to read portions of the dissertation and helped me achieve greater clarity with her forthright and insightful comments.

Acknowledgments

ix

I must also acknowledge a debt to the librarian and students, unknown to me, who very kindly photocopied all the material relating to Homer G. Richey, sparing me a trip to Virginia, which, though it might have been pleasant, would have been very inconvenient. And finally, I owe the debt of gratitude that all married scholars owe to loving and supportive spouses. My wife, Sylvia Michaels, encouraged a middle-aged college dropout to return to finish his BA, put up with me through graduate school, even when it seemed that I would never finish my dissertation, read the dissertation and critiqued it with unparalleled common sense, and finally read and critiqued important parts of the actual book.

Introduction

On August 12, 1954, an extraordinary scene was played out on the floor of the United States Senate; Hubert Humphrey, a liberal Democrat from Minnesota, introduced an amendment to a bill, an amendment labeling the Communist Party (CP) of the United States “the agency of a hostile foreign power,” “an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States,” and “a clear, present, and continuing danger to the security of the United States.” On that basis, Humphrey proposed penalties for membership under the Internal Security Act of 1950: fines of up to $10,000, or imprisonment for five years, or both. Full of fire, Humphrey declared: I want Senators to stand up and answer whether they are for the Communist Party or against it. I am tired of reading headlines about being “soft” toward communism. I am tired of reading headlines about being a leftist and about others being leftists. I am tired of people playing the Communist issue as though it were a great overture which has lasted for years. . . . This amendment will make the Communist Party, its membership and its apparatus illegal. It would make membership in the Communist Party subject to criminal penalties. . . . I do not intend to be a half patriot. I will not be lukewarm. The issue is drawn.1 Other liberals stood behind him, co-sponsoring the bill, with Wayne Morse of Oregon explaining, “What is sought to be done by the amendment is to remove any doubt in the Senate as to where we stand on the issue of Communism,” while Mike Mansfield added, “I think the time has arrived for all of us to stand up and be counted. I will not be lukewarm. . . . Either Senators are for recognizing the Communist Party for what it is, or they will continue to trip over the niceties of legal technicalities and details.”2 This was a very odd time for liberal Democrats to be taking a vigorous stand—outlawing a political party—that threatened the civil liberties of American citizens, which American communists—like them or not—were.

2

Introduction

Communist Party membership had tumbled from its 1944 high to a pitiful 5,000 members, and of these it is estimated that almost one out of three—some 1,500—were FBI informants. In fact, as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover later told a State Department member, “If it were not for me there would not be a Communist Party of the United States. Because I’ve financed the Communist Party, in order to know what they are doing.”3 Furthermore, by this time the great scourge of the liberals, Senator Joseph McCarthy, had already destroyed his own potency by his abysmal performance in a widely televised and widely watched set of hearings to investigate his charges of communist infiltration into the Army. By the time the hearings were over in June, McCarthy’s favorable ratings in the Gallup Poll had fallen from 50% to 34%. Karl Marx is often very slightly misquoted as having written that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. However, Humphrey’s Communist Control Act of 1954 seems more like a farce repeating itself as yet another farce. Ostensibly Humphrey’s purpose in proposing his amendment was to kill the bill to which it was to be attached, a bill sponsored by John M. Butler (R-MD) that sought to weaken unions by giving the Subversive Activities Control Board the power to determine if an organization was “communist-infiltrated” and, if it was, to remove its standing and legal protections as a labor organization. The idea behind Humphrey’s amendment was that it would accomplish a number of wonderful things: first of all, as Humphrey implied in his comments, it would kill the idea that Democrats were “soft” on communism. Also, it was generally known that the White House and FBI director Hoover and many conservatives were against making the CP illegal on the grounds that this would threaten the effectiveness of existing anticommunist legislation and might also drive the CP underground, where it might be harder to keep track of its 5,000 members. This opposition, plus the possible presidential veto that the amendment might draw (just before congressional elections), could make it look as though the conservatives were the ones who were soft on communism—and both liberals and conservatives hated the idea of anybody ever thinking that they were soft on any subject whatsoever. And finally, making membership in the CP a criminal act would protect people from irresponsible smear tactics; if one were accused of being a communist, it would be a matter for the courts to decide, and the accused would have all the legal rights of an accused person in defending him or herself; moreover, any would-be accuser would be rendered more careful since a false accusation could make him or her subject to libel and slander action. However, just four years earlier, liberals—again under the leadership of Hubert Humphrey—had attempted a similar apparently clever maneuver in an effort to head off Senator Pat McCarran’s Internal Security Act of 1950, adding an emergency detention plan for the internment of suspected

Introduction

3

subversives, should the president declare an internal security emergency. The idea was that this plan of putting Americans into concentration camps was so extreme that it would kill the entire bill. However, McCarran, not daunted, simply added the amendment to his bill and pushed the whole thing through. The liberals might have privately opposed the bill, but they did not have the courage to risk being labeled “soft on communism” and vote against it. Given that experience, one can only imagine that, with elections coming on, it must have been a sort of blind panic that made liberals believe that what had failed so abysmally in 1950 might succeed in 1954. The Humphrey bill did meet the expected opposition from conservatives, but they merely passed a version of the amendment that deprived the Communist Party of the rights, privileges, and immunities of a legal body while stripping away the penalties for membership in the Party. Despite the fact that none of the goals of proposing his amendment had been achieved, Humphrey declared his assent, saying, “Maybe we did not strike as strong a blow as Hubert Humphrey would have liked to strike in the bill, but we have not injured the laws which are now on the books . . . We have closed all of the doors. These rats will not get out of the trap.”4 Many prominent liberals were appalled: Adlai Stevenson condemned the bill, as did the Nation, the New York Post, and the ACLU. Journalist Murray Kempton wrote: Every great name in the pantheon of liberalism in the United States Senate was on the list of those who voted to make simple membership in the Communist Party a felony. Real politik has all but killed the liberals in this country, and we might as well drink the death brew at the wake . . . The recent record of the Democratic Party on civil liberties is at least as bad as that of the Republicans. And liberals are its architects.5 And Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., attacked the legislation in a piece in the (then liberal) New York Post, writing, “the Democrats succeeded triumphantly in placing their party to the right of Joe McCarthy, of Pat McCarran, of Judge Harold Medina.”6 He also wrote personally to Humphrey, telling him, It is absurd to say that the Communist Party presents a greater threat today than it did in 1946 when you and I in our various ways were trying to awaken the liberal community to the Communist danger. It is absurd to say that the Communist Party presents a greater threat today than it did in 1936. Yet the republic survived without resort to drastic measures in the thirties and forties . . . We licked a strong Communist movement to a frazzle by democratic means. For us now to say before the world that we no longer can cope with Communism

4

Introduction by these means . . . at a time when U.S. Communism has faded to a whisper—all this seems to me a confession of weakness, which can only persuade the rest of the world that we have indeed gone mad.7

Thus—when there was the least possible excuse or need for it—Congress passed what was in the end a toothless bill proposed and supported by self-proclaimed civil libertarians that, in the name of the defense of liberty, sought to provide, as historian Mary McAuliffe wrote, “the legal means to regulate and limit political expression to what was considered acceptable and safe to the current majority.”8

The Defensiveness of Postwar Liberals This book begins, then, with a question: why, when Democrats had led the country successfully through a world war; why when Democratic New Deal policies were associated with the average citizen of the United States—after a brief recession in 1946–1947—attaining unprecedented levels of prosperity; why at a time when Democrats had such a substantial record of accomplishment with little cause for apology were far right Republicans able to put and keep liberals on the defensive, attacking liberals’ core values without suffering a similar attack on conservative core values from liberals? For, despite occasional feeble attempts to associate conservatives with fascism, liberals never analyzed the key beliefs and assumptions underlying conservatism and consequently were never able to position themselves to launch an effective attack on those key beliefs and assumptions. The existing scholarship—which is extensive—explains much about postwar liberalism, but it does not explain this lack of liberal aggressiveness; historians of the period do not seem to have perceived it, and, in truth, they often seem to have been more concerned to pass judgment on the liberal response to McCarthyism than to explain it. In contrast, in the early days of the New Deal, the darkest of dark days for conservatives, the Du Pont brothers and executives of General Motors quickly moved to form a core of resistance to the New Deal with the creation of the Liberty League, laying the foundation for associating their version of private property with liberty, i.e., “Americanism.” From then on, conservatives relentlessly sniped at liberals, associating them in various ways and to various degrees with communism. Years later, when that sustained but determined resistance had finally achieved notable success, Ronald Reagan succeeded in turning the “L” word into a virtual obscenity from which liberals ingloriously fled, daring only after a long period of silence to resurrect it timidly with the word “progressive.” Liberals had not always been so passive in the face of a challenge. Populists, progressives and New Deal Democrats—most notably Franklin D. Roosevelt himself—had denounced in clarion voices the assumptions of conservatism as fundamentally un-American. But, as journalist Walter

Introduction

5

Millis pointed out in his 1958 account of the radical right, “after 1945 the orthodox liberals were . . . largely ineffective” against a cultural, political, and legal campaign that was geared “not primarily to the suppression of treasonable acts, but to the extirpation of the belief, out of which it was assumed that the acts had grown or might probably grow. That its methods were to be those of trial and punishment for association and speech, of the self-incriminatory oath, of denunciation on suspicion, and secret investigation was inevitable. For these are the only methods by which it is possible to discover, penalize, and so extirpate heresy as such.”9 This book arose out of a desire to develop some sense of how ordinary people—people who were not politicians and who were not professionally inclined or obligated to express their political views—understood the differences between liberalism and conservatism in a period marked by a particularly aggressive onslaught by the political right against the moderate left, the McCarthy period. I wanted to hear what such people had said because I was interested in what the debate between New Deal liberalism and anticommunist conservatism looked like when it was not conducted by people who were trying to please as large a number as possible but instead by people who were saying what they thought. It isn’t easy, it turns out, to find back and forth interchanges about American politics among ordinary people from the past. I did, though, find such a source in student newspapers of non-elite US universities (state universities that had, in the not too distant past, been agricultural colleges) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There, in the articles, editorials, and letters-to-the-editors, I found extended exchanges that expressed and, in fact, embodied the conflict between conservatives and New Deal liberalism. In the course of reading through and beginning to write about these exchanges, however, I began to notice something interesting about how they worked, something that impressed me as relevant to subsequent events in American political history (and even in some ways to the present). The liberal writers were certainly as well-prepared to engage in debate as their conservative opponents, but it was unclear that any debate ever actually took place. In a debate, the focus is on the ideas being expressed and their logical and/or empirical validity or falsity. But in the exchanges I have examined, participants were not attacking or defending ideas; they were attacking each other or defending themselves from each other, and words were the weapons they were wielding. Moreover, those on the right were generally the attackers and those on the left the defenders. What emerges in these texts as the main issue in contention is the legitimacy—not the truth, but the legitimacy, the acceptability as a strain of American political thought—of liberalism itself. This led to the realization that, despite the undeniable success of many liberal programs in American society, and despite even the fact that today many writers—on the left and on the right—regard the last half century as a period of virtual liberal hegemony, there has been and still is

6

Introduction

an important sense in which liberalism has often seemed under threat. Indeed, what the letters, articles, and editorials I examined show is that liberals understood themselves to be under attack for being liberals and they understood that the primary tactics used against them were either to conflate liberalism with communism or to portray liberalism as a sort of “gateway drug” on the path to the hard stuff, i.e., communism. However, though they understood the tactics being used against them by conservatives, liberals consistently appeared to be confused about why this was happening, especially since, in the early postwar period, most American liberals were as emphatic and vocal in their hatred of communism as any conservative could be. They also did not understand why the tactic was succeeding, or how to respond to it. Examining the exchanges included in this book has led me to conclude that, in part, this is because, though the opponents used the same words and appealed to the same values, what they meant by those words and how they understood those values were quite different.

The Underlying Issue: Democracy and Property At least from the American and French Revolutions through to the 1880s, the great political issue in Western Europe was universal suffrage: advocates of the working class favored it because they assumed that a democratic majority would use the political power of a majority to change the distribution of property, and most of the elites opposed because they too assumed that a redistribution of political power would result in a radical redistribution of economic power. James Madison, like many of his contemporaries, distrusted democracy, and as he famously noted in “Federalist 10,” “Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society,” and while the “apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.” In other words, if people with little or no property can control government, they can, and have a strong incentive to, use that political power to take the property of the rich. This, he thought, was one disastrous result to which the rule of mere numbers could lead. So, Madison pushed for, and got, a federal Constitution with serious checks on democratic power. Decades later, in Great Britain, a substantial number of working people viewed the same issue from an opposite angle; the People’s Charter of 1838, signed by 1.3 million people, demanded the vote for all adult men. Methodist minister Joseph Rayner Stephens emphasized the economic basis of Chartism, arguing that “[t]his question of universal suffrage is a knife-and-fork question, a bread-and-cheese question,” summing up the

Introduction

7

situation of the working poor: “the truth was, the working men were all white slaves.” Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels espoused the Charter, writing: universal suffrage is the equivalent for political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat form the large majority of the population, where, in a long, though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class, and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants, but landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of universal suffrage in England would, therefore, be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent. However, once blessed with the vote, working-class people in both Europe and North America turned out to be far from revolutionary. The male segment of the British working class only received the vote in 1867 after British elites had become convinced, in part because of the moderation of British trade union demands, that the newly enfranchised voters would not seek to overturn the existing system. Indeed, it was in that year that the Royal Commission on Trade Unions in 1867 opined that the legal establishment of unions was to the advantage of both employees and employers, with the result that unions were finally legalized in 1871 with the adoption of the Trade Union Act of 1871. Similarly, in Germany the Marxist Social Democratic Party, though officially revolutionary, in practice followed socialist politician and author Eduard Bernstein’s advice and became evolutionary, committed to working within the existing system to seek advantages for the working class. And by the time the German Socialist Party came to power, in the post–World War I period, party leader and president of the Weimar Republic Friedrich Ebert stated, concerning revolution, “I hate it like sin!” Finally, when, at various times, workers did make demands that elites considered unreasonable, the wealthy, as robber baron Jay Gould is said to have boasted, found that they “could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” whether as Pinkertons, militia, policemen, or soldiers. Leftists had been puzzling over the lack of revolutionary ardor in the greater part of the working class since the time of the Babouvist conspiracy during the French Revolution. Karl Mannheim and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci both pondered the issue of “false consciousness,” i.e., working-class support for political groups and regimes inimical to the interests of the working class—why did so many people not vote for their own economic interest? Hegemony, i.e., the control of the minds of the workers by the elites through elite control of the press, communications, the schools, etc., was Gramsci’s answer.

8

Introduction

What Gramsci never dealt with, however, was the question of precisely how the elites used their control to manipulate the minds of the working class. Members of a dominant social group may control communications, education, and everything else, but the question remains, what precisely do they have to do with those assets to get society’s have-nots to refrain from using the ballot to redistribute resources and power from the wealthy to themselves? After all, people need to be persuaded and convinced to get them to vote a given way—in colonial days that might have been done by providing plenty of strong punch and perhaps some money, but the methods have changed in modern times. In this context this study will adduce the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who found that there are two types of social “glue” that hold groups of people together, one based on the division of labor that binds people together functionally and the other based on a shared body of beliefs and opinions that binds people together psychically. Though the division of labor lies at the heart of the economic functioning of capitalist societies, the principle of holism—group identification characterized by shared values and a general sense of sameness—persists, and if we examine how elites manipulate working-class people who have the votes to expropriate the rich, we see again and again that it is through the same device, i.e., identity politics. A few examples should suffice: as Edmund Morgan has shown, in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, which threatened to bring together landless whites and blacks against the elite Virginia planters, the planters instituted the first Virginia code of laws designed to assert white racial superiority as a way of separating the two groups by emphasizing the commonalty of poor and wealthy whites in their whiteness while giving all Caucasians legal and social superiority to black people. One hundred and fifty years later, when populism showed signs of uniting the poor of both races, the Jim Crow laws were instituted for precisely the same reason, i.e., to break up the threatened alliance between poor white and poor black farmers by again using the legal system to emphasize the superiority of whites over blacks and the superior importance of racial identification over economic interests. Simultaneously, in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s we find Bismarck using another and very potent form of identity politics, nationalism, in his attempt to combat the rising power of the German Socialist Party. And, of course, this tactic was employed by Mussolini and then by Hitler. In each case, there is a deliberate and successful effort to create a sense not just of group identity, but of group identity in opposition to the “other.”

What Is a Liberal? The meaning of the word “liberal” is itself the object of a certain amount of academic controversy; this book is specifically about postwar welfare state liberals, also known as New Deal liberals. Nonetheless, it still might

Introduction

9

be objected that it is improper to apply the word “liberal” to what could be seen as a constellation of constituencies differentiated by place, ethnicity, gender, class, etc. If the term “liberal” could only be defined by the espousal of a set of programs without any underlying principle, then these objections would be reasonable and, indeed, critical. Certainly, this is where pluralism and the “end of ideology” thinking of Daniel Bell would lead us. However, developments since the 1970s have clearly demonstrated that Bell and the other pluralist liberals were mistaken in their belief that the United States had entered a state of permanent nonideological consensus. At the heart of the present project is the notion that political ideology is and has been unescapable in political systems at least since the 1600s. The approach I am taking in The Liberal Dilemma has been inspired in part by the work of political theorist Michael Freeden, who, in his Ideologies and Political Theory, argues for the importance of political ideologies in linking political thought to political action. However, where Freeden seeks to construct a morphological description of ideology that avoids essentialism, I argue that political ideologies are and must be essentialist and that an ontological assertion is central to their existence and their function. This study concentrates on events and individuals on just a few college campuses during the early 1950s, and one might wonder, fairly enough, whether this concentration on college campuses tells us anything more than what was transpiring on a few college campuses, that is, whether it makes sense to generalize about American politics on the basis of this extremely limited set of sources. However, if the proposition suggested earlier is correct, that is, if there is an essential phenomenon or set of phenomena that we call liberalism or conservatism, then the analysis of these does not necessarily entail forays into the utterances of all the possible instances of liberalism, i.e., union members, the very left progressive Henry Wallace, Reader’s Digest, or even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Dewey, or John Kenneth Galbraith. How the thing may differ at the edges under various circumstances is not the point at issue; what is the point at issue is the thing itself. What is required is not exhaustive examples but the right examples. So, if it is true, as suggested earlier, that, despite variations, at a certain level liberals are liberals and conservatives are conservatives wherever one finds them, then those in the academic arena offer several advantages in studying all liberals inasmuch they tend to be more articulate (and therefore provide more words—as per the writings adduced in this book—and slightly more precise words to analyze) than the ordinary citizen and more forthright (because not running for office and compromising the expression of their opinions in the effort to please as many voters as possible) than the ordinary politician, and finally, the students who play the greatest role here, being, by and large, the recipients of society’s “received ideas,” are more ordinary than the ordinary public intellectual.

10

Introduction

An example may clarify my thinking; “red” and “pink” were important smears in the context of anticommunism, whether conservative or liberal, and liberal politicians spent a fair amount of their time and energy denying conservative accusations that they were pink (or red). In fact, it is Hubert Humphrey voicing a variant of this denial that opens this chapter. However, the significance of this color code, widespread though it was, has not, to my knowledge, been thoroughly examined by anyone so far. I take it up in one chapter of the book, showing its deployment in an extended exchange of letters and concluding that one person, a conservative University of Virginia instructor named Homer G. Richey, puts his finger on what is actually at issue, which is the status of private property. “Redness” clearly is not an issue of political freedom—the United States supported dictators all over the world as long as they were on the right side in the Cold War. Nor was it an issue of religiosity, powerful though that issue was—our European allies were often insufficiently pious to suit our standards. No, the issue was that communism was an ideology opposed to private property. More to the point, it is just the fact that liberals have an intermediate view on private property—advocating market economies while being willing to compromise absolute rights of private property for what they consider to be the greater good—that opens them up to conservative accusations of being pink. Liberals are pink! However, it is the fact that they did not have a reasonably clear understanding of themselves, their core positions, and, most of all, the rationale underlying those positions that prevented them from crafting a more effective response to conservative attacks than Humphrey’s periodic assent to and espousal of laws that would limit the civil rights of American citizens. This analysis does not deal with anything that is restricted to a campus setting, but rather to a phenomenon of the red scare (again, the word “red”) that was all-pervasive; however, the slightly more precise expression of thought of the actors in the campus setting allows a sharper light to be cast on the issue and allows what I hope are revealing insights to be drawn from it. The liberals, both student and adult, in the texts I examine show themselves to be at a loss regarding how to deal with this; after all, they see themselves as exemplary individualists, far less conformist, far less mentally stifling, far more tolerant than their right-wing tormentors. And, as we have also seen, liberal responses to these attacks comprise mostly claims of innocence combined with protestations concerning the behavior of their accusers. In other words, liberals don’t attack conservatism per se, just the behavior of conservatives—there is a big difference between these two actions. To attack conservatism and the values associated with it would be to mount a genuine offensive that might offer some actual hope of victory; however, liberals during the McCarthy period simply do not do it. The reason they don’t is because they cannot, and the reason they cannot is twofold: first, they do not understand that they do not

Introduction

11

face an opponent but an enemy, an enemy bent, not on their conversion through argument, but on their destruction, that is to say, as detailed in Chapter 3, bent on depriving them of the means of making a livelihood; second, in order to mount an ideological attack on someone else, one must have an ideology of one’s own to propose as the correct alternative. But liberals eschew ideology, and this forces them willy-nilly to be reactive only. Metaphorically we could say that liberals have walls and a roof— programs—but no foundation—ideology—to support them. The result was that liberals—whether the professional politicians, the public intellectuals, or those students, teachers, and others more peripherally associated with the academic world examined in this book—merely ended up waiting for the next assault from the right, while the right—both radical and moderate—consistently had the initiative and was never forced to defend its core principles against what liberals would undoubtedly have considered to be the inherent selfishness, inhumanity, and destructiveness embodied in those principles.

The 1950s, a Liberal or Conservative Decade? It has been usual to regard the 1950s as a conservative period, so much so that Richard H. Pells entitled his study of postwar liberalism The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age. That view has been brought into question in recent years, notably by Jennifer Delton, who, in her Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal, argues that the volume of liberal legislation that was passed during the decade marks it as a high point of liberalism. However, this line of reasoning makes the error of confusing liberal achievements in the 1950s with liberal aspirations. If, as Daniel Bell opined in The End of Ideology, there was a social need for a utopia as a guiding vision, then, as he suggested, there was some need to “specify where one wants to go.” For liberals of the period a general delineation of that goal had, in fact, been specified in Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights” outlined in his 1944 State of the Union Address. Derived from the 1943 report of the National Resources Planning Board and later cited by Truman in a September 6, 1945, message to Congress as the basis for his administration’s reconversion policy, this agenda famously proposed “human happiness and well-being” as its fundamental goal and universal access to life’s fundamental necessities as its specific goals. Equally importantly, it proposed these, not as privileges or as the hoped-for byproducts of a well-functioning economy, but as fundamental rights belonging to all people. This is the most fundamental and forthright statement of liberal aspirations for the postwar period that we possess. From this point of view the liberal legislation of the 1950s touted by Delton represented, at most, modest steps along the way toward that greater goal. Moreover, it must be remembered that most of the initiatives of Truman’s Fair Deal were stopped dead in their tracks by congressional conservatives.

12

Introduction

In the policies of Truman’s successor, Eisenhower, we see another instance of the corporatism that marked Herbert Hoover’s program as well as Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act. As Robert Griffith put it in his essay “Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,” Eisenhower sought “to resolve what he saw as the contradictions of modern capitalism and to create a harmonious corporate society without class conflict, unbridled acquisitiveness, and contentious party politics.” Drawing on Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform and Robert Collins’s The Business Response to Keyes and his More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America, we can come to a more accurate understanding of liberalism in the 1950s through the mid-1960s, seeing this as a period when to both the center left and the center right, economic growth seemed to be the magic elixir, allowing liberals to hope that a fully developed welfare state could be funded through the mechanism of ongoing economic expansion without necessitating the unpleasantness and controversy entailed by any redistribution of wealth from the havemores to the have-lesses. And that is almost exactly how Walter Lippman put it in 1964 when he wrote, “A generation ago it would have been taken for granted that a war on poverty meant taxing away money from the haves and . . . turning it over to the have nots . . . But in this generation . . . a revolutionary idea has taken hold. The size of the pie can be increased through invention, organization, capital investment, and fiscal policy, and then a whole society, not just one part of it, will grow richer” (quoted in Collins, More, 60). At the same time, the center right could afford to tolerate relatively strong unions and a modest expansion of a modest welfare state in a period in which these did not seem to impinge on the possibilities for corporate expansion and the horizons of corporate profits. So, both sides came together in envisioning a corporate economy oiled by Keynesian policies in which cooperation rather than confrontation dominated. And so, in this light the 1950s become recast, not as a period of liberal triumph, but as a period, on the business side, of corporate cooption of some liberal aspirations for corporate purposes and, on the liberal side, of liberal acquiescence in some corporate aspirations for the sake of some important but still very limited gains. Where they separated was where the left emphasized growth, the right emphasized stability and the containment of inflation, and where the left favored the interests of labor, the right favored those of business. However, the consensus, such as it was, was always uneasy. Despite what was at best a truce, an important mechanism for the future dismantling of a key constituent of the Democratic coalition, strong unions, was put in place with the “right to work” provisions in section 14(b) of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Also, the conservative far right politicians of the period, both Republican and Democratic, effectively acted as the attack dogs of the center right, keeping up relentless attacks on liberals and liberalism while affording the more moderate right-wing politicians plausible

Introduction

13

deniability. Much has been made in recent years of Eisenhower’s central role in bringing down McCarthy, but it must be recalled that Eisenhower was quite content to allow McCarthy’s scurrilous attack on Adlai Stevenson during the 1952 campaign. It was not until it became clear that in the wake of that GOP victory, McCarthy—despite having been rewarded with the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, a seemingly innocuous position that the deeply conservative Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft assured himself would put McCarthy “where he can’t do any harm”—had no intention of becoming domesticated and even attacked the Army that Eisenhower started to move against him. Finally, it is important to remember that political positions have shifted, that what was once the extreme political right is now the mainstream right. However, even back in the 1950s the conservative far right was no fringe group—McCarthy may have been a bit of an outlier, but no senator was more powerful than the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Franco-supporting Pat McCarran.

The Argument Whatever the state of liberalism during the 1950s, it is in its response to adversity that a political position is tested and that the value of an ideology shows itself. Ideologies are not only belief systems; in fact, the focus in this book is on the relationship between the beliefs contained in ideologies and their critical function as tools for political motivation, mobilization, and action. I’ve already pointed out that very early in the New Deal era conservative forces—both Republican and Democratic—began to rally, claiming the all-American mantle of individual liberty and, from that stance, attacking liberalism and the New Deal as communistic. That attack was unceasing from that time on, helping to whittle away, bit by bit, support for New Deal liberalism and the institutions—most importantly, organized labor—that supported it. In the wake of the Great Depression, liberals, riding the tide of the popularity of welfare state programs in the aftermath of the greatest financial disaster the nation had ever known, saw no need to define themselves, and, in fact, actively resisted any such effort. However, there would be a significant price to pay for that in the future: in their darkest hour, the advent of the Reagan administration, having allegiance to a set of programs but lacking an ideology around which to rally, liberals crumpled, and, in the years that followed, the moderate left fled from the dreaded “L” word. Once the immediate crisis of the depression had passed and American prosperity had been restored, liberals needed some further justification for their proposed expansion of the welfare state. There was some consciousness at the time of the need for some kind of specificity: as Daniel Bell noted, “a utopia has to specify where one wants to go, how to get there,

14

Introduction

the costs of the enterprise, and some realization of, and justification for the determination of who is to pay.”10 The questions, however, that he and others left unanswered are (1) what is it that is to be realized and (2) why? Bell urged that “there is now, more than ever, some need for utopia” but without any consideration of why? And for whom? Presumably for everybody, but again, why? Liberals have assumed that the answer to these questions is self-evident, but they clearly are not, or else everyone would be liberal. As historian Jennifer Delton wrote in her essay “Rethinking Post-World War II Anticommunism,”11 “[t]he New Left understood that liberalism was in fact an ideology, but as progressives themselves, thought the alternative was something more to the left, more democratic. Neither group foresaw that conservatives—of all people—might be able to rehabilitate the old laissez-faire ideals and recapture political discourse and power.” And, again, they were able to do so because they had an ideology, mostly implied and not internally consistent, but still an ideology based on an implied ontology. This book deals with the political challenges faced by American New Deal liberals. The issue addressed here is not the validity or lack thereof, the truth or falsehood, of various formulations of concepts and ideas, be they liberal or conservative, but rather the much more limited one of ineffective political language. I will be arguing that the deficiencies outlined earlier were a result of the history of liberal thought and of the core assumptions of that body of thought. I will also be arguing that liberals were impeded in their ability to communicate with the voting public and in their ability to attack or defend themselves from their conservative opponents by a seemingly arcane and abstruse issue, i.e., the liberal abhorrence of metaphysics, an abhorrence of “final truths” that is a liberal inheritance from the intellectual traditions of pragmatism and political pluralism.

The Scientific Method and Liberal Pragmatism Secular liberals of the 1950s, in general, were committed to that combination of Baconian induction and Cartesian deduction called the scientific method, augmented by Peircean abduction, as the most trustworthy path to truth. Scientific truths are, by their nature, open-ended, which makes those who espouse the scientific method as the best path to the solution of what they perceive to be social problems resistant to “final truths.” As one student, Paul Wilson Sullivan, whose views will be examined in this book, puts it, truth “resists a single formula,” “is always open to change,” and “remains open.” As limited beings, Sullivan argues, we “get as close to truth as we can,” but lacking complete truth, the human status is that of the perpetual seeker, making life “a searching, not an arriving.”

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15

Public liberal intellectuals like Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Daniel Bell made a point of making no assertion about what really exists. Bell’s most famous work, The End of Ideology, was a rejection of the very idea of ideology, which he disdained, writing, “A total ideology is an all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality, it is a set of beliefs, infused with passion, and seeks to transform the whole of a way of life. This commitment to ideology—the yearning for a ‘cause,’ or the satisfaction of deep moral feelings—is not necessarily the reflection of interests in the shape of ideas. Ideology, in this sense, and in the sense that we use it here, is a secular religion.”12 Rather, the postwar liberals built on American pragmatism and its near relation, instrumentalism, both of them approaches to social issues whose measures of appropriate action are, in their coarsest form, “what works.” As William James (whose pragmatism was explicitly embraced by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his 1962 Saturday Review article “The One Against the Many”) put it, pragmatism is “the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.” Schlesinger celebrated this separation of action from what he considered to be the rigidity imposed by systems of fixed belief, particularly when he considered the approach of one of his political heroes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “The whole point of the New Deal,” Schlesinger wrote, “lay in its belief in activism, its faith in gradualness, its rejection of catastrophism, its indifference to ideology, its conviction that a managed and modified capitalist order achieved by piecemeal experiment could combine personal freedom and economic growth.”13

Pluralism Coming from this point of view, and with the recent and horrifying consequences associated with the ideologically motivated systems of fascism and communism in their minds, liberals believed that systems of social thought that ideologically favored any player over the others—whether it be the Marxian proletariat or the conservative “titan of industry”—were sure to go to harmful extremes and the intellectual core of these “imbalanced” social systems was the rigidity produced by their reliance on a metaphysical basis, an underlying theory of reality. For these reasons, ideologically based systems were anathema to those who believed that cultural and moral relativism were necessary to a society’s ability to accommodate cultural and ethnopluralism. So, for example, to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the process, one that would keep business, labor, and other sectors of the economy in a constant state of competitive play, was the key to ensuring the most favorable results for all, with the government playing the role of a referee who makes sure that none of the contestants actually wins, i.e., annihilates the others.

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Introduction

Problems of Pragmatism It sounds so simple, and even comforting, when William James, in his famous essay, blithely assures his readers that they need not trouble their minds with finding an underlying truth, that all people need concern themselves with is “what works.” The difficulty is that, when applied to the realm of politics, the pragmatic formulation never addresses the question of “works for whom?” To answer that question, some assertion regarding who or what is real—“first things”—is required. After all, liberals sometimes ask people to act to their own detriment on behalf of others; they espouse programs that require people with more resources to contribute to the well-being of people with less, programs that in the late 1940s and early 1950s included federal housing programs, unemployment insurance benefits, tax cuts for the poor, federal funding for education, federal health care and health insurance programs proposed under the Fair Deal, and civil rights legislation, And to answer the logical question, “Why should I support these things?” an answer is required that goes farther than “because it works.” After all, it may be that I am very comfortable with letting other people go without food, or shelter, or medical care as long as I do not; that “works” for me. Certainly, for example, most Caucasians in the American South seem to have been perfectly happy to live in a world that at every turn privileged them over their African-American neighbors, and many Caucasians in the North believed that white Southerners had the right idea. As political converts, these, however, may have been inaccessible to the liberal agenda under any circumstances. The important political target was those voters who were not firmly planted in the left or the right but who needed some nudging one direction or the other; to move such a person, some kind of logic, a view of and rationale for a certain kind of society, is particularly important. To maintain and expand liberal programs against right-wing attacks under circumstances that would sometimes be adverse, liberals needed to ask and answer the questions: why should I care about people I have never even met? What relationship exists between them and me that obligates me or would make it desirable for me to care? An answer to these questions requires an assessment of all parts of any relationship, i.e., the self, the other, and the connection between them. It was and is a knotty problem, especially for a racially and ethnically diverse country with a deeply entrenched culture of racial and ethnic discrimination. It had been relatively easy for Franklin Roosevelt, who made free reference to Christian values and traditional American values of neighborliness and whose programs avoided giving offense to white Americans by serving African Americans at a lower level. And in ethnically homogeneous

Introduction

17

Sweden the social democrats had been able to institute a strong welfare state on the basis of a model of mutual obligation based on the metaphor of family, the “People’s Home” (Folkhemmet). However, for postwar secular liberals who proposed that those with more help those with less, who proposed that people of color be included as equals in a nation deeply steeped in racism, a different model of relationship was necessary, one that would encourage and justify the inclusion of people previously excluded. However, either liberals simply just took it for granted that something like racial equality or help for the poor is fair, with the assumption that everybody should intuitively understand and accept that, or else liberal intellectuals like John Dewey offered sophisticated and abstruse analyses of the relationship between the individual and society that were never translated into terms or imagery that could be used as the basis of an electoral appeal, analyses that offered no visceral motivation for the policies that liberals espoused, especially those involving any degree of self-sacrifice. In either case, the logic of the liberal appeal for action on behalf of others was not accessible (because not articulated) or not clear (because too complicated); therefore, it was politically useless, being a good basis neither for asking for votes, nor for an attack against political opponents, nor for defense against political opponents. Politically and historically, the result of this failure was not only that liberals had no positive basis for an assertion of their own goals but also that when liberals were attacked by conservatives as being almost or actual collectivist, un-American communists, they had established no positive basis for a refutation, no firm basis for an explanation of the relationship between individuals and society, which is to say between self and other. Therefore, since liberals lacked a positive language to explain to voters what they—liberals—were all about and lacked the language to make a case to voters that conservatives and conservatism were bad for the voters and bad for America, when attacked—as we shall see in a number of university case studies—liberals lacked the intellectual weapons for a counterattack. In short, liberals did not have an effective political vocabulary. And so, during the McCarthy period when the political far right, with the tacit consent of much of the moderate right, geared up for a major attack on the New/Fair Deal with the issue of communism as the stalking horse, liberals played right into the hands of their opponents, addressing themselves predominantly to the stalking horse, i.e., communism, defending themselves against spurious attacks, and never, ever striking back against the core beliefs of their opponents, i.e., against the conservative version of individualism, the conservative version of patriotism, and the conservative version of America.

18

Introduction

Chapter Summary Chapter 1: Student vs. Student: Two Episodes Chapter 1 examines two 1947 student controversies on two New England campuses to illustrate the already somewhat nervous mood that existed among politically inclined students and to establish the opening premise of the dissertation from which everything else flows, i.e., that the response of college anticommunist liberals to right-wing anticommunist attacks was purely defensive, seeking to defend freedom of speech and to unravel that tactic of the right that already conflated liberalism with communism. The exchanges in this chapter demonstrate that as early as 1947 at least some students believed that a full-fledged “red scare” was underway. It also shows the deployment of familiar phenomena associated with red scares, including the use of innuendo by conservatives to launch attacks on the loyalty of liberals. Liberals argue that this growing atmosphere of repression silences debate regarding effective remedies for real social and economic problems, and as a result, America’s ability to deal with those problems in an effective way is being impeded. College liberals are also beginning to put forward an analysis that suggests that hampering effective remedies to social ills actually perpetuates communism inasmuch as people are most likely to turn to communism when democratic capitalism fails to address their problems. Chapter 2: War by Other Means Chapter 2 analyzes the language used in a 1951–1952 controversy at the University of Massachusetts to demonstrate that political discourse as employed by right-wing anticommunists was actually “war by other means,” a struggle, not to arrive at a reasoned solution for social ills, but rather through rhetoric to annihilate a political opponent—to the point of removing their ability to make a livelihood—by casting them as outsiders, as “un-American.” The chapter focuses on the fallout after a talk by Gordon Hall, an independent investigator of extreme right-wing groups and the publisher and editor of a monthly magazine, Countertide, dedicated to exposing groups on the extreme right. A student objects to Hall’s analysis, and the brouhaha that follows brings in correspondence from Suzanne Silvercruys Stevenson, the founder of the Minute Women of the USA, a right-wing women’s group, and Florida KKK leader Edgar W. Waybright. These letters show the grassroots participation in the effort to define, identify, and disable the “enemy from within.” Chapter 3: Homer G. Richey and the Political Power of a Symbol Chapter 3 goes on with an in-depth examination of a 1951 episode at the University of Virginia in which a right-wing anticommunist professor engaged in a controversy with students and, in the process, sought to tag

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his entire department with the “red/pink” label. This chapter analyzes the language employed by the protagonists to establish (1) the importance of the “red/pink” symbol as an accepted shortcut, (2) the meaning of that symbol, and (3) the fact that the symbol has a structure that shapes any discourse that includes it in a manner that is automatically detrimental to liberals. The chapter demonstrates that a certain construction of the association of private property with individualism was the critical point at issue and that, to the extent that liberals acquiesced in the symbolic language, they opened themselves to the liberal-communist conflation alluded to earlier. Chapter 4: Mapping the Liberal Mind: Paul Wilson Sullivan This chapter constitutes an in-depth examination and analysis of the thought of one philosophically minded college anticommunist liberal essayist, writing at the end of the McCarthy period (1953–1954), who combined in his thinking and writing many of the widely accepted thought constructs of liberals of the day, including a devotion to pragmatism along with pragmatism’s aversion to “final truths” or metaphysics. This is connected to an adherence to relativism and a concentration on and prioritization of open-ended process—thought, discussion, implementation of action—as the path to the best social results. Wilson’s core faith is in the human capacity for reason and in the ability of reason to conquer ignorance. However, exalting relativism as the essence of tolerance, reasonableness, and flexibility paints him into a logical corner, for if values are not to be judged by any absolute measure, then there is no basis for judging and rejecting any values at all, including those of one’s ideological opponents. Conclusion: Vital Center or Excluded Middle? The conclusion builds on Chapter 4 to show how the liberals’ aversion to metaphysics, however reasonable, functions as an important liability in the political warfare with conservatism inasmuch as the pragmatic formulation for action, “what works,” does not and cannot answer the question “works for whom?” To answer this question requires the establishment of a viable “whom,” something that can only be achieved by the type of metaphysical ontological assertion that pragmatists abhor. This chapter reiterates that liberals are devoted to open-ended process—the scientific method in fact—but that their ideological opponents speak a language of real existents that the voting public and the average nonintellectual understand and accept. Liberals are unequipped to launch an attack on their conservative opponents because liberals (1) show no understanding of this core distinction between themselves and those opposed to them and, (2) with their prioritization of process, have no positive social vision of their own to offer as a substitute.

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The chapter also looks at an article by a liberal student, Harold Orel, finding in it a possible resolution of the liberal dilemma. Orel raises the possibility of an aggressive liberal response, attacking the conservative and the ideology of conservatism in its entirety not only as un-American but also as un-human, inhuman, and, with regard to bettering the lot of Americans, impotent. Finally, the chapter explores the possibility that, despite disclaimers, a liberal metaphysical stance can be inferred by an analysis of the policies espoused by liberals.

Notes 1. John B. Gilmour, Strategic Disagreement: Stalemate in American Politics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 111. 2. Congressional Record, 833 Congress, 2 Session. 14210, 14213 (Aug. 12, 1954). 3. Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), 224. 4. Mary S. McAuliffe, “Liberals and the Communist Control Act of 1954,” The Journal of American History 63, no. 2 (September 1976): 351–367, 360. 5. Murray Kempton, New York Post, August 24, 1954, 34. 6. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., New York Post, August 24, 1954, 33. 7. William W. Keller, The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 66. 8. McAuliffe, “Liberals and the Communist Control Act of 1954,” 351–367. 9. Walter Millis, “The Rise and Fall of the Radical Right” Virginia Law Review 44, no. 8 (December 1958): 1291–1300. 10. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, (Glencoe, IL Free Press, 1960), 405. 11. Jennifer Delton, “Rethinking Post-World War II Anticommunism,” Journal of the Historical Society 10, no. 1 (March 2010): 1–41. 12. Bell, The End of Ideology, 399– 400. 13. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Sources of the New Deal” in The New Deal: The Critical Issues, Otis L.Graham, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 120.

1

Student vs. Student Two Episodes

There is . . . [a] force loose in the world today, Mr. Chase. It is a conspiracy, a Godless, atheist conspiracy, out to destroy all Christian civilization, out to destroy all mankind, out to destroy every person who is not part and parcel of this atheistic, Godless conspiracy. The head of it now is a man by the name of Khrushchev. He would make Hitler and he would make Mussolini look like innocent Sunday school boys, Mr. Chase. Richard Arens, Staff Director, Committee on Un-American Activities1

The University of Connecticut The year 1947 was a year of markedly increased tension in the rapidly developing Cold War. It was in March of that year that President Harry Truman came before Congress to announce the Truman Doctrine. It was also during the month of March that Truman issued Executive Order 9835, requiring loyalty checks of more than two million federal employees. And, during the month of March, Secretary of Labor Lewis B. Schwellenbach (1945–1948) before the House Labor Committee proposed that the Communist Party be deprived of its right to “elect people to public office” and asserted that employers should have unlimited right to fire “Communists or subversive individuals.” And it was during the same month that the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities heard some remarkable testimony as James F. Green, chairman of the American Legion’s Americanism Commission, told the members that there were at least 100,000 communists in the country who formed the nucleus of ten military divisions. Their job was to soften the United States “for the ultimate assault the Soviet government intends to make.”2 These assertions were supported by William C. Bullitt, former ambassador to the Soviet Union, who added that if the USSR had an atomic bomb, “it would already have been dropped on the United States.” Speaking for the American Legion, Green endorsed two measures that were before HUAC, namely to make membership in the Communist Party illegal and to make it illegal for “Communists to run for federal or state office, or for anyone to teach communism or mail Communist propaganda.”

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Student vs. Student

Former ambassador Bullitt added two recommendations of his own: a requirement that the Communist Party list all dues-paying members and that there be a legal assumption of fraud when a communist applies for citizenship (on the grounds that the actual allegiance of communists was to the Soviet Union). The University of Connecticut, isolated though it was in the tiny town of Storrs, was not insulated from these events. In the student newspaper, The Connecticut Campus, a student commentator, Jonathan Czar, described a convocation address delivered by university president Jorgensen as “rejecting the methods of the witch-hunt and in opposing any abridgement of the guaranteed individual liberties.” Jorgensen, Czar wrote, balanced a “kick at Communism” with a “bow to the Bill of Rights,” noting that these utterances were “both intended for other ears than just those of the student body.”3 This was the heated national political atmosphere that had been developing when, on March 30, 1947, the Hartford Courant ran a headline that read in large letters “A RED EXPOSED AT U. OF C.” Below, it went on to say, “Thanks to Bernard T. Burns of Waterbury, Alfred L. Marder of New Haven of the University of Connecticut’s branch of American Youth for Democracy, has been smoked out. In a public debate at the University Mr. Marder admitted that he is a Communist. The debate followed charges by Mr. Burns that American Youth for Democracy was tinged with communism. While the University probably cannot, and should not if it could, exclude any student for his political views, the public unquestionably has a right to be concerned with this organization that seeks to extend its teachings among the students.” This all began on March 7, 1947, with an anonymous letter written to The Campus. It read as follows: I am a married vet—living in the Willimantic Housing project. I attended Connecticut before the war and upon my return to The Campus, I was shocked to find an A.Y.D. organization active. I wonder if the majority of students realize what this organization stands for. I recently read an article by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I. I quote the following passages: The youth work of the Communist Party reveals the same deceit and trickery that characterizes the Communistic approach. For years the Young Communist League was used as a recruiting field for Party members and as a proving ground of Communist leaders. Then the Young Communist League could no longer conceal its real purposes from American youth and had served its usefulness to the Party. In mid-October, 1943 the Young Communist League dissolved, only to be reactivated the following day under the high-sounding name, American Youth for Democracy, with Carl Ross, former head of the Young Communist League in New York, as its executive

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23

secretary. This new front then embarked on a program of activities, among other things establishing youth centers ostensibly to combat juvenile delinquency. More properly these centers could be termed Communist youth recruiting centers. The Communist view on veterans is identical. They want them for Party work. When they champion the veterans’ cause, they do it because it serves the Communist cause. Proudly pointing to an alleged 15,000 Communists who served in the armed forces, they regard such of them as have come back into the Party as a nucleus around which to build in the future. Traditionally, they have vilified and smeared the principal veterans’ organizations who put loyalty to their country above subservience to totalitarian philosophies. The above may be found on Page 90 of the February issue of the American magazine. I feel this article should be published in The Campus to let the students know what goes.4 The letter was signed “STUDENT VET.” American Youth for Democracy was the successor to the Communist Party of the USA’s youth group, the Young Communist League, after that organization was dissolved on October 16, 1943. For nearly two years the Communist Party’s National Board denied any connection to the AYD, but in April 1946, it acknowledged the relationship. Ellen Schrecker notes that this affiliation was “no secret,”5 but, as subsequent developments were to show, in 1947 neither students, nor faculty, nor the administration were aware of this at the University of Connecticut. Soon after the letter from “Student Vet” was published, the leader of the UConn chapter of the AYD, Alfred Marder, came to the defense of his organization in a letter in which he criticized “Student Vet” for ignoring substantive work the AYD had done, including working for a summer session for Connecticut students, increased subsistence allowance for veterans, racial equality, international cooperation for peace, increased educational facilities, and finally “support to the average American in his fight for a better life.” Yes, he wrote, the AYD includes all sorts, “Communists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, veterans, students, teen-agers and young workers” and, essentially, so what? AYD, he claimed, was an independent organization that was only “interested in the many problems that face young people” and to this end invited the anonymous letter writer to “cooperate to unite rather than divide the “student movement.’” Bitterly, Marder attacked “Student Vet” for hiding behind a shield of anonymity, urging him to “come out into the open of public attention and recognition.” He sought to shift negative attention from himself to his attacker, comparing him to Nazis and declaring that “this type of labeling will be recognized by most veterans who will see in it the technique of the masters of ‘red-baiting,’ Goebbels and company.” And for good measure, he concluded with a challenge for the accuser to unmask himself,

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to “appear in public debate on The Campus” so that the students could indeed know “what goes!”6 It did not take long for other students to weigh in on this controversial issue, some favoring Marder, some his anonymous attacker. Joe Tudisco, a political columnist for The Campus, wrote a letter to the editors accusing the “Student Vet” of belonging to a class of persons who “while paying lip service to the word democracy, would violate the basic precepts of democracy and forbid their existence, i.e., freedom of opinion, organization and expression.” Tudisco went on to defend AYD as an organization that had taken a series of stands that “no democrat, not even the most conservative,” could have found to be other than “in keeping with all that is admired and expected in a democracy.” It had petitioned against the egregiously racist Mississippi Senator Theodore G. Bilbo,7 stood against a racial discrimination incident in the nearby town of Willimantic, favored the FEPC,8 and urged participation of UConn in the founding convention of the National Students Association in Chicago. The only action of the AYD that Tudisco allowed could be construed as controversial was its role in bringing Harry Ward, the chairman of the American League for Peace and Democracy and a Soviet apologist, to the University to address student and faculty members.9 Tudisco defended the AYD’s role in the “Harry Ward incident” on the grounds that he (Tudisco) could not accept that “a person is unAmerican merely because his ideas and opinions do not coincide with mine” and added that the only reason “Student Vet” had to go to war was because “the Hitlers and Mussolinis would deny us this right.” Moreover, he pointed out that “to deny the right of differing opinions is to admit of a lack of confidence in the American people to uphold and maintain democracy.” Having disposed of “Student Vet,” Tudisco turned to the authority the anonymous letter writer had cited, hinting that Hoover’s questionable role in the red scare of 1918–1920 brought his credibility into question.10 Another student, however, Allison Broatch, came to the defense of the anonymous letter writer, pointing out that he had not indulged in any “name-calling” (as Marder had alleged) but “merely quoted the opinion of J. Edgar Hoover, chief of F.B.I., on the American Youth for Democracy.” The burden of Broatch’s argument was that in the end “[t]he facts remain that the A.Y.D. is considered Communistic by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That should be significant to any American.” So, where Tudisco saw Hoover as suspect because of his past, Broatch saw him as trustworthy because of his position.11 In addition, on the same day a letter was published by the originator of this debate. Responding to Marder’s challenge to reveal his name, “Student Vet” identified himself as Bernard J. Burns of Willimantic, married with one child. Burns had been a student at the university before the war and had gone to serve in the US Infantry in the European Theater, where

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he was wounded three times. He had now returned to the university as a junior and expected to graduate in the class of 1948. Now Burns came to his main point: “As an American and as a veteran and as a student at the University of Connecticut, I hate Communism in the United States. We don’t want it here and I am willing to contribute my share to keep it out of here.” He went on to reiterate his earlier précis of J. Edgar Hoover’s indictment of the AYD, concluding, “You should not argue with me, Mr. Marder. Your argument should be with Mr. Hoover. However, if that’s the way you want it, I am most willing to have a public debate with you at your convenience on this question. Just name the place and the time and I’ll be there with a large number of other veterans and students who love America and hate Communism just as much as I do.”12 Having allowed things to develop this far and concerned about the possibility of an indefinitely prolonged controversy, the editorial board of The Campus decided to put a lid on the matter, announcing that “starting today, no Letters-to-the-Editor concerning the current American Youth for Democracy controversy will be published in The Campus, unless there are new developments.”13 And, in case anyone missed the point, it published Burns’s letter under the heading “A.Y.D. Finis.” However, it seems that the issues raised were too compelling to students to be put to rest so easily. First, a letter came in from Pete Hill challenging the decision to silence the discussion. Hill suggested intellectual debate should be encouraged, not stifled, because the “present condition at the University of Connecticut is not one of intellectual seething and strife. In fact . . . apathy prevails . . . the trend is toward mental stagnation.” Hill went on to insist that “the situation calls for a shift in editorial policy. It shouts for a policy that doesn’t merely tolerate the expression of provocative ideas, but one that encourages and even insists on material for publication in The Campus that challenges the reader’s mind.”14 The Campus editorial board defended its decision, replying that “our policy is not to ‘steer clear’ of controversial issues, but in the case of the AYD discourse we felt that the issue had degenerated into a personal feud and had therefore lost its value.” But it did not realize that matters had already passed out of its hands. Carl Nielson of the University Debating Club announced that the debate that Marder had proposed and that Burns had accepted would take place on the question “What is the AYD?” At first Nielson had no success in getting the two to agree on the precise subject to be debated. At an initial meeting with Burns and a representative for Marder, Burns wanted to debate “Resolved: The AYD Has Communistic Sympathies,” but Marder’s side would not agree to that. They contended that the topic should be “Resolved: The AYD Should Be Allowed on the Connecticut Campus.” Burns said this was not an appropriate subject since he had no objection to the AYD’s presence on campus; he just wanted students on The Campus to know what the AYD was and what it represented.

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Then, at a second meeting arranged by Nielson, Marder and a representative for Burns agreed to discuss the question “What is the AYD?” Each contestant would be given half an hour to expound his views and then would be allowed to ask each other questions. After that the audience would be allowed to ask questions, but not to give opinions. It was agreed that there would be no votes and that it would be a discussion, not a debate. With a public confrontation set to go, the editors of The Campus decided to take a more active role in the controversy, printing an editorial entitled “The AYD and Communism.” It prefaced the piece with an explanation that it had not hitherto taken a position, despite being asked to by “several people,” because it did “not feel well enough acquainted with the subject.” Now, however, “having consulted information from the FBI,” it declared its belief that AYD was a communist organization and “merely a tool which Communist leaders in the United States are using to weaken the democratic structure of this country in the hope of causing a revolutionary collapse of our governmental system.” Having said this much, it tried to draw a distinction between the local branch headed by Marder and the organization, saying, “We are not labeling the local chapter of the AYD as a group of student Communists. But in the last few weeks, the pinkish tint covering the national AYD organization has deepened into a screaming Red.15 We feel that any group affiliating itself with such an organization in name is naturally suspected of sharing identical beliefs.” Having thus attempted to protect itself from accusations of assigning guilt by association, it went on to proclaim the complete justification for assigning such guilt: “Anyone not in complete accord with the Communist ideal should sever himself from any connection with the AYD. Otherwise, he has absolutely no retort if accused of being a Communist.” And finally, it attacked the core evil itself, communism, writing, Needless to say, we hate Communism. We hate everything it represents. It just “rubs us the wrong way”. We have been raised in a democratic country and imbued with the democratic ideals of equality, freedom of speech, and freedom of worship. But Communism is a direct threat to these ideals since its ultimate aim is to destroy them. Yes, we live in a “free” country. We can think as we like. But if we open the door to Communism, we are as foolish as the man who exposes his home and family to thieves and murderers. Communism has no place in the United States. Throughout the country, honest, sincere Americans have been hood-winked into Communist organizations which have highsounding names such as the “American Youth for Democracy”. These organizations are as “American” as Joe Stalin. By this time the ruckus at UConn had become the focus of some national attention, with an Associated Press article noting the upcoming debate

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and the controversy that had generated it. The article also noted the “hands off” policy adopted by university president Albert N. Jorgensen and the faculty in the matter, along with Jorgensen’s refusal to make any public comment.

The Debate And so it was that on March 26, 1947, some 300 students packed themselves into a room in Beach Hall to hear Burns and Marder debate the question “What is the AYD?” Marder opened, claiming common ground with Burns on the commitment to democracy expressed in Burns’s letters. However, as he had done in his own letters, Marder deplored Burns’s attack on the AYD, likening it once again to the red baiting tactics used by Hitler and Mussolini in their heyday. Marder then went into the history of the AYD, explaining that the AYD was started in New York City at a meeting of 500 young people committed to upholding the principle of interfaith and interracial tolerance. He contended that the AYD was not affiliated with any political party and was opposed to any form of discrimination and that all people could belong to the organization regardless of political affiliation. Moreover, he said, the organization had no problem in admitting a communist who met the requirements of membership, especially since anyone who “battled against big business” would be labeled a communist in any case. He went on to stress the independence of the local chapters from the national organization, saying that each chapter of the AYD made and followed its own policy. In terms of its positive agenda, Marder described the AYD as youth-run, youth-led, and youth-determined, standing for a strong United Nations and the enactment of Fair Employment Practices; the AYD fought for the extension of the Office of Price Administration, protested lynchings in the south, and supported a veteran housing program and a soldiers’ bonus. And he lauded the organization as one that had opposed Senator Bilbo’s “racial attacks” and that supported a strong United Nations. Burns began his rebuttal by claiming that the discussion had strayed far off the track. To bring things back to what he considered to be the proper subject of the meeting, he read his first letter, which appeared in the March 7 issue of The Campus. Saying that he would rather be debating the question “Is the AYD communistic?” Burns asked why it should be believed that the UConn chapter of the AYD was independent and did not follow national policy. He then quoted from an article in the March 16 New York Times that told of a student AYD chapter at the University of Colorado being banned from the campus for communist sympathies. Going on to cite a variety of articles and pamphlets that illustrated the “boring from within tactics of the AYD and other Communistic elements,” Burns said that no one had brought a

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libel suit against J. Edgar Hoover for his article in the American Magazine (since he had already said this in his letter responding to Marder, it seems that this absence of a libel suit constituted decisive proof of accuracy for Burns; in this case, of course, he was correct. But also, one might have argued that the FBI was never engaged in the illegal collection of information because no one had ever brought suit against it and, in that case, one would, of course, be wrong). “He is in a better position to know about Communism than anyone else in the country,” Burns claimed. Given all this, Burns concluded that he could draw no other conclusion except that the AYD had “communistic tendencies.” Marder then turned to Burns and asked whether he knew if Hoover had ever made a speech against fascism. Burns replied that he did not know and that he wasn’t qualified to answer the question. Marder then sought to drive home his point by telling the audience that, in fact, Hoover had never made such a speech. Turning back to Burns, Marder then asked him if he would call the CIO communistic. Burns replied that the question was irrelevant to the subject for the night and refused to answer. Then came what was to those present the shocking climax of the evening: Burns faced Marder and asked him outright, “Are you a communist?” And Marder admitted that, yes, he was. This was the confession that led to the headlines with which this chapter opened: “A RED EXPOSED AT U. OF C.” The headline was a bit unfair since the said communist had, in fact, exposed himself. In any case, the disclosures led to some heated feelings and discussion in the hall. A few students, most notably Marshall Clough, a veteran who had spent a year in an Army hospital recovering from wounds received during the North African campaign, became particularly excited, equating communism with fascism as a political evil. Clough was sufficiently uncontrolled to be called out of order. Yet on the whole, the immediate response of the student body seems to have been measured. A quick sample of student opinion after the discussion seems to show that the majority of students felt that Burns was more effective with his quotes from concrete sources than was Marder with his “philosophical and idealistic arguments.” A letter from four students published immediately after the event applauded open discussion as “the best possible means of analyzing an issue.” These same students, however, expressed their disgust with the “comments of a very few that their preference would be for fascism against communism,” claiming that “what we find distasteful in the communism espoused by our Marxists takes on even more deplorable forms in fascism.” This brought forth a letter from Marshall Clough, the student who had been found to be out of order at the meeting. Clough began with an apology for his outburst but emphasized that he was unrepentant regarding the substance of his statement. He emphasized his antifascist

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credentials, pointing out that he had “the Nazis to thank for the year [he] spent in Army hospitals as a result of wounds received during the North African campaign.” However, he reminded his readers that for every piece of territory seized by the Germans, there was territory illegally seized by the Soviet Union. Clough finished by pointing out that “The Fascist aggression has been stifled. The Communist aggression is still continuing as can be learned by reading the daily papers.” He continued, writing, Is there any real difference between Communism and Fascism? To me they are manifestations of the same thing under different names and in direct competition with each other. I don’t want to see either form of government here, but I’d just as soon see one form as the other. Let me repeat in different words: as far as choice between the two, there is NO choice. Neither can be justified, no matter how eloquent the arguments. The discussion had wider ramifications. The Hartford Courant had gotten wind of the controversy and ran an editorial congratulating Burns and denouncing the AYD. It finished with these encouraging words: The exposure of Mr. Marder for what he admits he is, a Communist, is a healthful development. Mr. Hoover in his testimony in regard to methods of fighting communism had this to say: “Victory will be assured once Communists are identified and exposed because the public will take the first step of quarantining them so they can do no harm.” To that cause Mr. Burns has contributed most creditably and commendably. He deserves the unstinted support of all who can aid him in fighting communism. In all truth. for us Americans it is “an evil and malignant way of life,” diametrically opposed to ours, no matter behind what fine-sounding organizations and purposes it skulks to hide its true nature.

Aftermath It was at this juncture that Joe Tudisco, a student who had already participated in the early stages of this controversy, wrote a letter that summed up the problems that liberals were to have with the entire red scare of the 1940s and 1950s from beginning to end. Tudisco opened with these words: “The ‘Communist issue’ has assumed such great proportions that even the liberals and progressives are afraid to mention the word ‘Communist’ for fear of being labeled ‘Red’ . . . This is unfortunate because it discourages honest expression of opinion on issues of vital importance.” He was expressing the two key worries that haunted liberals through the period: (1) that an atmosphere of intellectual

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repression was developing that operated by conflating liberalism with communism; and (2) that the consequent repression of open speech would inhibit America’s ability to deal with its problems, questions that, as we shall see, were of central concern to college liberals of the period. He went on to ask why communism was gaining acceptance in more and more of the world: was it because it offered better answers to the problems of life? Or because of the “ills and vices” of the older regimes? Tudisco chose the latter, suggesting as would many other college liberals— who tended to be more in line with Arthur Schlesinger’s view that espoused political tolerance of communists who did not actually engage in subversive activity than with Sidney Hook’s insistence that to be a communist was to be one who had lost all claim to scholarly objectivity and, hence, all claim to academic employment—that the key to stopping the spread of communism lay in a positive rather than a negative approach: applying liberal democracy to addressing human needs and remedying injustices, rather than the attempt (in many if not most liberal minds futile, since it addressed symptom rather than causes) to eradicate communism through force or intimidation. Moreover, repressive actions such as Schwellenbach’s proposal to ban the Communist Party would lead to other abuses. As examples Tudisco pointed to Governor Thomas Dewey of New York’s act of “arbitrarily” closing the doors of the state legislature to a group from New York City because “there were Communists among them” (which, Tudisco added, was a violation of the state constitution) and Schwellenbach’s proposed bill that would forbid “pro-Communist sympathies and activities.” Tudisco wanted to know: is a Fair Employment Practices law “pro-Communist”? Representative John Rankin of Mississippi, he wrote, was reported to have said he would vote against a Fair Employment Practices law because “it is one of the planks of the Communist party platform.”16 Later on we will see Homer G. Richey, a vehement McCarthyite at the University of Virginia, taking a similar position. Finally, returning to a theme he had sounded in his opening, Tudisco wrote that the anticommunist crusade was distracting the nation from substantial business and was acting as cover for substantial attacks on key liberal issues. He suggested that “instead of devoting all our time and efforts to the ‘witch-hunt,’ we consider, among other things, the effect some 200-odd anti-labor bills and the latest tax reduction proposal before Congress will have on our national economy and morale.”17 At the same time The Campus weighed in, re-emphasizing its opinion that the debate had reinforced its conviction that the AYD was a communist organization and urging the administration and the student senate to take official action, either to recognize the organization or to “take disciplinary steps.” Apparently, the student senate had the same idea because the local chapter of AYD was the subject of a “spirited discussion” at the next meeting. After a long discussion the senators reached a tentative

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agreement that although they could find no justification at the present time for recommending the removal of the group from campus activity, they would monitor its future activities and behavior.18 Marder, apparently believing that the best defense was a good offense, wrote again, attacking The Campus for engaging in “yellow journalism” and going “out of its way to prejudice the minds of the student body” by condemning the AYD before the debate had even happened. He then broadened his attack on the newspaper by alluding to its alleged lack of involvement in a case of racial discrimination by a local hotel that had taken place the month before (February 1947): “Please do not fall over yourself again to maintain that it was under different management then, or that things were different then or any similar lame excuse. We are in the habit of judging people by their records not names. May I recommend this habit to you?” He went on to point out the AYD’s association with a large number of popular liberal causes, including the campaigns for a strong FEPS, for a summer session, for a strong Office of Price Administration, for veteran housing, for veteran subsistence, against Bilbo, for academic freedom, and for the national health bills, and he challenged The Campus editor to align himself with them as well if he desired credibility in the matter of having the interest of the students and his country at heart. He further insinuated that The Campus and Burns had coordinated and were acting, not independently, but as mouthpieces for undefined outside sources. He claimed that Burns’s letter and the offending editorial had too much the same tone and tenor for me who, as a National Council member has the opportunity to see the situation from a national view, to believe that you sat down at your office, peered out into the window and produced a document so similar to the one that appeared in The Campus. Likewise, in this regard I must bring out the point that Mr. Burns, too, is not able to claim that he was the lone hand in his letters and speech. Evidence to the contrary had reached me before the discussion, but, unlike Mr. Burns, I was unwilling to use this statement because, although the source is reliable, I did not believe that I should further handicap Mr. Burns. Finally, he suggested that, “as a demonstration of your sincerity,” the newspaper take an active role in looking into the Sigma Nu fraternity (to which Bernard Burns belonged) on charges that it discriminated, having no “Jews, Negroes or Orientals” in the local chapter.19 The editor of The Campus, Jerry Sapienza, now feeling that things had gotten personal, wrote back under his own name acknowledging that, indeed, his mind had been made up before the debate occurred. To that he added, I knew before the discussion that you were a Communist, Mr. Marder. Through a very elementary knowledge of Communist

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He denied, however, Marder’s charges that he was a tool while acknowledging that since he was “no authority on the subject of the AYD or Communism” he had “found it necessary to fall back on information supplied by an organization which is considered by most people at least, as a reliable source, namely the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He also directed Marder’s attention to the February 14 issue of The Campus, pointing out a front-page article on the discrimination case Marder had mentioned along with an editorial on the subject.20 All this was clearly causing consternation and making some students do some serious thinking as they tried to understand the political world that was forming around them and engulfing them. Richard Pinkevich acknowledged that he sat in “silent and somewhat confused attendance” at the AYD debate. He noted that communism, “fast becoming a national issue,” had been “widely recognized as the threat from within.” Yet he believed that more dangerous than either communism or fascism for that matter was the threat of “too little thinking,” “too little knowing or examining.” He deplored what he believed to be a general tendency to substitute “pet phrases” for considered thought based on fact. Ignorance, then, was the “foremost threat from within,” while “enlightened thought” was the foremost weapon available for the betterment of society.21 Arthur Frechette weighed in with a similar theme but aimed at a more specific target. While congratulating Bernard Burns for bringing the communist affiliation of the AYD to public attention, Frechette pointed a blaming finger at the student body; he claimed that minority groups— both racial and intellectual—would inevitably form their own little groups—like the AYD—to try to get the “social equality” that they had been denied by the “intolerance” and “prejudice” of the majority. The most significant part of his letter in the present context was that paragraph in which he expressed the nervousness that had already become so typical of liberals of the period; he was already concerned that any attempt at impartial reasoning would open him to suspicions of disloyalty, and so he employed a typical tactic of college liberals—a preemptive selfdefense: “Careless readers may draw the conclusion that I am defending the AYD and Communism. Nothing could be further from the truth.” The fact that he believed—rightly or wrongly—that the impartial attempt to explain the existence of the AYD could be confused with an adherence to its beliefs and, furthermore, that, as a result, he could personally become vulnerable is eloquent testimony to the atmosphere of concern, of worry,

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that was influencing, subtly or grossly, the intellectual activity of university life in 1947.22 A different note was struck by Leonard Fish, who wrote deploring what he felt to be sensationalism by The Campus over the “unmasking” of Marder as a communist. Fish wrote, “I, for one, was not at all surprised at the statement for it never was a secret.” Marder had mentioned this fact not only to Fish himself but to several “prominent people” on The Campus staff. The tone of sensationalism, he claimed, served to “create a false hysteria, confuse the issues and the public,” preventing real issues from being discussed “with rationality and calm.”23 A letter from Eugene H. Lehman, Jr., complimented one and all, The Campus, the debating club, and the administration, for sponsoring “such open and honest discussions” and allowing “fiery controversial issues” to be aired. Describing himself as “a neutral who has followed this controversy with considerable interest,” he strove to maintain a meticulous impartiality, summing up the arguments that had been presented on both sides and noting that the communists seemed to favor many programs that were beneficial. He mentioned that Burns had argued that the reason the communists supported “all these good things” was that they wanted to gain members, to which Lehman responded, “Well, doesn’t every political party?” The lesson Lehman took away from the exchange was that although communist doctrine included elements with which he disagreed—including the suppression of opposing parties and forbidding the advocacy of capitalism—still, it could not be labeled “subversive” any more than campus groups such as Hillel (a Jewish organization), the NAACP, or “any other minority groups with international associations with part of whose program we agree.”24 Lehman’s letter rubbed Allison Broatch, Burns’s first supporter in this controversy, the wrong way, and she wrote in response. She began with a curious summation of Lehman’s identity (apparently she had been doing her homework, but to what end is not clear), identifying him as a person who had completed his undergraduate work at Yale University in 1933 as a pre-medical major, held an MA from Teachers’ College of Columbia University (1937) in child guidance and mathematics, and was now acting as an instructor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut. She also mentioned that he had served in the Army during the war. What makes this paragraph odd is that she ends it with a triumphant phrase, “So much for the identity of Mr. Lehman,” as though she had just exposed his background as a dangerous radical. Broatch went on to her main point: criticism of Lehman’s assertion that suppressing opposing parties and forbidding advocacy were not subversive in and of themselves. She pointed out that recent history suggested that a single party state would mean “dictatorship, regimentation, suppression of civil liberties” and asked whether this was not subversive to “our form of government.” Moreover, she said that the communist program would

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forbid the advocacy of capitalism, that this was unacceptable, and that “it is vital that the freedom of each citizen to advocate capitalism, socialism, or any other economic ‘ism’ be preserved.” Having made her substantive points, she turned back to Lehman, writing, “Mr. Lehman does not consider these two points in the Communist program to be subversive or dangerous to the American principles of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Mr. Lehman, I can only conclude that you have not understood the points at issue. Or have you?” The tone of innuendo, the safe device of accusing without actually committing oneself to a real accusation, was becoming part of student tactics in political discourse.25 Lehman, clearly piqued, responded with a forthright and detailed clarification and defense of his position, noting that “[u]nder subversion I classify only acts specifically recognized as illegal or words encouraging such acts. Recommending changes in the laws however is not subversive.” As far as communists were concerned, “as long as they merely advocate suppression of opposition they are within the law, therefore on the safe side of the thin line.” Communists were not the only ones, he continued, who sought to alter America’s laws in antidemocratic ways: “Rankin openly favors the Fascist policy of disfranchisement of Negro Americans. I can hardly imagine a more vicious principle of government; nevertheless, he has a right to state his views, while we have the duty to get him out of office as speedily as possible.” Finally, seeking to administer the coup de grâce to his opponent, he finished: These wide limits on freedom of speech were set by John Stuart Mill, and for further discussion I recommend him to Miss Broatch. Does that convince Miss Broatch that I have understood the points at issue?26 And with that the editorial board of The Campus again intervened with a decision to close the discussion emanating from the AYD controversy. It wrote, “We have refrained from taking this action sooner due to the possibility that the issue might die a natural death, but such has not been the case.” And the letters mentioned earlier were not all that had been submitted; the editorial went on to mention that “[a]t press time today, we have a few letters which are well-written with worthy content, but which cannot be printed because of their excessive length.” The editors announced themselves pleased with the entire exchange, one that stood as an example “of increased student interest, an interest which is in marked contrast to the apathy of the past two or three years.”27 Though that was the end of this particular exchange of letters, echoes continued to sound for some time afterward. For example, in

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a letter complaining about racial practices at the university and what he believed to be hypocritical positions on the part of The Campus, an African-American student, Alfred James Washington, Jr., echoed Arthur Frechette’s sense of atmospheric threat when he finished by stating, “Just for the record, I am not a Communist Party member or a member of the A.Y.D. (although I find pitifully few other organizations open to me here other than those labeled pink or red).”28 And Pete Hill wrote to protest President Jorgensen’s refusal to allow W. E. B. DuBois to speak on campus; the reason Jorgensen alleged was that the three groups— the Freedom League, the PCA, and the AYD—petitioning to allow him to speak were not “approved organizations.” Hill pointed out, however, that other groups not officially sanctioned, including the Young Republicans Club and the Newman Club, were permitted to present speakers, and so he concluded, quite reasonably, that Jorgensen was not being straightforward. The political orthodoxy of the Freedom League was unquestioned, Hill said, and the PCA, though left-of-center and occasionally the object of red baiting, as were all groups that were not “downright reactionary,” was “not seriously considered to be a tentacle of the Kremlin.” This left the AYD, which “is pretty well established as at least having many communists in it,” while “a great many people of mature judgment believe that it is a communist front set-up.” Hill made the by now obligatory disclaimer, saying that he believed that “were the Communist Party to gain state control in the U.S., many of the freedoms of action now open to most Americans would disappear.” However, he went on, I further believe that the best and only insurance we have that the CP will not take over in the US is to make democracy work so well that the CP won’t get any support. Making democracy work means extending freedoms, not restricting them. Restricting the freedom of the AYD on campus—which is what I think has happened—is playing the totalitarian game of silencing the opposition. If democracy is as desirable as I think it can be, the opposition can sound off continuously without effect.29 And this was the last word on the AYD in The Daily Campus.

The University of New Hampshire As the US World War II alliance with the Soviet Union began to fall apart, some students at the University of New Hampshire started to look at the erstwhile ally with a critical eye. As early as November 1946 the student newspaper, The New Hampshire, ran an approving editorial commenting on a recent Catholic conference—the Conference of New England Newman Clubs—that the university had hosted. The anticommunist

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theme had been a powerful one at the conference, and the editorial expressed appreciation of that stance, saying communism is more than a form of government. It is not only a threat to our form of government but a corrupter of social institutions. As a form, of government alone communism could possibly be tolerated by some, but to accept communism would mean the dissolution of all the moral and ethical foundations of our culture which we now accept as a matter of fact. The editorial went on to quote a comment made by an English writer, Joseph G. Thomas, in a 1937 article from the magazine America: “The Catholic church is everywhere becoming the sole champion of certain parts of traditional morality which members of people who have never associated the idea with Catholicism desire to preserve. One has only to mention the private property of the small man, the authority of the family and the permanence of marriage to see the truth of this.” Two students who were members of the University’s Liberal Club, Charles Chase and Gilbert Gredler, were not pleased by what they had read. They wrote, attacking the editorial as being based on unsupported assertions, reproaching the newspaper for “presenting the attitude of the Catholic Church against Communism instead of straightforward facts”; indeed opinions “should be backed by rational, factual information.” Seeking to follow their own guidelines and offer opinion based on what they believed to be facts, Chase and Gredler came up with what, in hindsight, proved to be a poor example. They cited a clergyman, the Reverend Louie DeVotie Newton, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who had recently returned from a journey to the Soviet Union with the opinion that “[t]he future of religion is as bright in Russia as anywhere in the world. When the USSR was first formed, religion was contraband, but now the government has discovered that religion cannot be destroyed, so it has invited the church to come to their front door.” If one wants to defeat communism, they wrote, expressing an opinion that we have met before and will meet again, that task is best accomplished by fixing the ills of American society and the world. If Americans would “take a constructive approach and try to make our form of government the best possible,” then there “would be no need of worrying about Communism and its ‘evils,’ and the fact that it might spread to other portions of the world.” They also quarreled with the notion put forward by the editorial that the Catholic Church is the great advocate of “the small man, the authority of the family and the permanence of marriage,” asking, “Don’t these lie in the heart of our culture, and are they not supported by many other institutions besides the Catholic Church?”

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The main concern of the letter writers, however, was that the editorial acted as an agent of division during a period in which “a new segment of society, an international student fellowship,” was emerging that would transcend national, racial, and religious differences. In other words, they were looking to a world that would be dominated by harmonious connections among individuals, not restricted by the parochial divisions of nation and creed. There were other stirrings of concern in early 1947: one editorial pointed to the Rankin Committee30 as posing a danger to education by “attempting to dictate the ideas and ideals which may be studied and discussed in the American educational system,”31 while another expressed concern about the obstructive role of “name-calling” in the conduct of foreign affairs. The basic tone of the red scare was starting to set in. The editorial quoted at length Dr. Laurence B. Packard, professor of history at Amherst College, who had stated that “It is very difficult to deal with ideas as evolved in connection with Russia’s part in the present world revolution without being called a red.” In his comments, Packard set out the fundamental liberal anticommunist position, saying, I am not going to try to make any reds, but I am going to try to explain the reds, so that with freedom of judgment and critical approach, boys will be able intelligently to say they do not approve of communism or fellow traveling, rather than to denounce, smear and call names with the ignorance that everywhere about us, and with the intolerance that has been growing alarmingly . . . Freedom in thinking is one of the foundation principles of the republic. We can’t have freedom of thought unless we deal with basic ideas . . . When we can achieve tolerance of ideas, then in a sense we can be called educated. This was the anxious political mood that was already in place when a strange event that had occurred at the university emerged into public view. On November 6, 1947, a group of documents appeared in The New Hampshire regarding an interchange between two students, Gilbert Gredler—whose acquaintance we have already made—and Bob Young. The first was entitled “Statement by Gilbert Gredler” and was an extract from a longer report Gredler had made before 66 students at a meeting sponsored by the university’s Liberal Club on October 29. At that meeting a motion was passed endorsing the report and directing that it be published with the warning that “Mr. Gredler’s statement is of the gravest import. The student body is urged to give it serious consideration.” Gredler prefaced his statement by pointing out that “[t]oday with the Loyalty purge, and the Thomas Un-American Committee32 in action, our civil liberties are threatened,” and he went on to ask, “Is that true only

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of the national scene—is there any threat to our liberties on the local scene—meaning in this specific case, the University of New Hampshire? What follows may help answer that question. This is a report of a direct conversation.” On Monday, October 21, a student entered city room to talk with me. During the course of conversation, he wanted to know where I stood in politics—he said it was time to clarify my position because the FBI had quite a record on me and it would be better for them to know just where I stood so I could not be suspected of being un-American. He also said that the FBI had gone through my room. He then asked me about certain students on campus—he very much wanted to know just exactly where they stood in politics—were they Communists? How did I get to know them and how long have I been going around with them? And didn’t I know it was dangerous and bad for me to be seen with them? He said no one was behind him. He was a sole liberal trying to get rid of any Communists that might be in liberal organizations. He had told me that he was also fighting fascism, but all the questions he asked were concerned with persons whom he thought might be Communists or progressives. He then said that if I didn’t continue to go along with him because “you have committed yourself here” (I had done nothing of the sort—I kept leading him on in order to try to find out what he was trying to do)—the FBI would be notified and my movements would be watched from now on, day and night. What you have told me here, he said, will be evidence against you and will be used against you if necessary. But I said that I thought that spoken word was not proof, but he replied that though he was not with the FBI, he knew them well enough so that his word would be considered good with them and would be proof. He said the FBI would move in when they got information on these people and organizations. I asked him how they would do that—since belonging to the Communist party is still legal and so is being liberal and belonging to liberal organizations. But he replied “Do you think that the FBI will stand around and do nothing when they have all this data?” He wanted to know how a former student got caught last year. He said that this person comes down to school weekends (he flunked out last semester) and that on the weekend of October 19 he had given this person an assignment. He also told me that this person was connected with the FBI. The above is what happened to me—threats and intimidations—to a liberal student on this campus. I have not done anything subversive or un-American. I am standing up for my rights. Another incident that has occurred on this campus is the matter of “spying” on professors. A student was approached to spy on

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professors at this university! But he had the common decency to refuse to do so, and he went to the professors involved and told them the story, that he had been approached by a New Hampshire newspaper. These two incidents affect you. I was threatened; do you want to be threatened; do you want to be threatened and told what to believe, what to do?33 That same edition of the paper carried a response from the student who had approached Gredler, Bob Young (it seems that the Gredler piece had already been circulated among the student body). Young felt aggrieved on several counts. His complaints included the fact that he had not been informed that Gredler was going to make a report. Moreover, he claimed that Gredler had refused to discuss the matter either with Young in front of a faculty member or with staff members of The New Hampshire. Also, Young alleged that his request to meet with the Liberal Club “to bring out the truth by discussion” was turned down. He finished: Obviously they don’t want to give me a chance to say anything in my defense in spite of my repeated attempts (and those of others) to get the truth out. This is a deliberate smear campaign by certain members of the Liberal Club. It is a malicious, gross misinterpretation of a conversation. I want to get the truth out. They refused to do so. What are they afraid of? I think we can ignore the obvious hysteria of such a fantastic report. What all of us should be concerned with is what is behind it all. What we should ask is “Why?” I ask why to all these things.34 At this point the university administration became involved, bringing the two students together to discuss the matter; they were unable to reach an agreement, and subsequently the Dean of Men, William A. Medesy, issued a statement, noting the inability of Gredler and Young to come to terms and also reproving, although not by name, Gredler and the Liberal Club, saying that “If an individual or organization feels that it must make a public statement, fair play seems to demand that the accusation should be made available to the party accused and he should have an opportunity to reply through comparable medium.”35 Young was then given such an opportunity, and on November 11 he read a statement to the Liberal Club that was subsequently published as an open letter by The New Hampshire. It is an odd document, filled with mysterious references to unidentified “minority interests.” Young begins with praise of liberalism, saying its basic attributes are “justness, understanding, and tolerance,” and continues on to accuse the Liberal Club of having betrayed all those good qualities by printing “unjust, unproven, malicious misinterpretations of a conversation between Gilbert Gredler and myself.” Young admits that he went to Gredler’s room to talk to him and says he did so on

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the advice of the adviser of the Liberal Club “to find out what he [Gredler] knew about the rumored newspaper spy ring on this campus and to enlist his aid to help me find out the truth of such rumors.” Also, he says he went to speak to Gredler because “somebody had gone through my room and my papers” and continues on, “[n]ot realizing his position, I asked him if he knew of any minority interests that would do such a thing.” Young never says why he chose to go to Gredler at all; he does not specify why he thought Gredler might have special knowledge about the “newspaper spy ring,” nor does he say why he thought Gredler might know anything about the search of Young’s room. He also does not clarify what “position” Gredler might have been in that required understanding, and though he refers repeatedly, in different contexts and always with contempt, to “minority interests,” he never says whom or what he means by this phrase. In any case, apparently this line of discussion “brought out our talk about Communism.” Young does not say who initiated that subject but does say that Gredler made “repeated suggestions . . . as to getting the numbers and names of those holding Communist Party cards” on campus. This, presumably, is the part where in Gredler’s version, Gredler was “leading him [Young] on in order to try to find out what he was trying to do.” Young says, “I told him to do nothing and that I was interested in finding out about this so-called newspaper spy ring.” It is here that Young makes an interjection that seems to tip his hand as having been, after all, a would-be communist hunter; he says loftily, “May I go on record to say that I have no more interest in the small fry Communists here on campus than I have in the man in the moon. Nor do I feel that they are any more threats to this campus than that man in the moon. They flatter themselves.” Since he is already looking into a “newspaper spy ring,” it seems fair to infer that if he is not interested in “small fry Communists,” it is because he is interested in “big fry” communists; however, common sense suggests that any communist of any description hanging around the University of New Hampshire was hardly likely to be anything other than “small fry.” The vagueness of Young’s language gives rise to a conspiratorial tone that does not sound quite connected to reality. For example, there are his repeated references to unspecified “minority interests”; criticizing the Liberal Club, he says regarding his conversation about alleged campus communists with Gredler, “He has not denied nor can he deny that this part of the conversation under question was intended to be considered as hypothetical conjecture on my part. I cannot help if any fearful elements in your group become hysterical at this supposed threat to their minority interest.” He goes on to say to the club members, “You have been content to allow this minority influence in your group to railroad you into line.” And then later, in his conversation with Gredler regarding the search of Young’s room, “I asked him if he knew of any minority interests that would do such a thing.”

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Now he turns to his criticism of the Liberal Club for “tolerating vicious and malicious smears about me and others in your group.” When Young speaks of his allies, he is as vague as he is about the nefarious “minority interests”; it is always “I and [unspecified] others.” Speaking of his response to Gredler’s report, he writes, “First, I laughed as did others who immediately saw through such a fantastic report. Then I was angry when my and others’ efforts to bring out the truth was thwarted. Now I and others are simply disgusted.” He goes on to warn the club: I and others cannot help but feel that if you are to retain the integrity of your name and if you are to clarify your position on campus, you should publish a statement in which you admit your grave error and truthfully state that in the interest of the people on this Campus you will be far more careful before you are so quick to accept the word of one of your group without proof, and grossly, unjustly condemn and smear any person or persons here on campus. Young’s use of the term “others” could have no significance at all; perhaps he was just respecting the right of people who agreed with him not to have their names publicly mentioned. However, taken in combination with his repeated references to unspecified “minorities,” it gives his statements a tone of ungrounded conspiratorial paranoia. He warns the club that it has “been used very badly by the obvious minority factors in your group” and scolds it for having allowed “small interest and influence to use you badly.”36 On the other hand, some of the questions he asks seem fair enough. Gredler seems to have been unwilling to discuss the matter in the presence of the Dean of Men, and we do not know why. It may be that his account was a distortion of what actually transpired and he was afraid of possible consequences; on the other hand, the tone of his published statement is one of alarm; perhaps in the developing “red scare” mentality of the period, he was concerned about the threats that he alleged Young had made and was afraid to pursue the matter more publicly. Bob Young, though he calls himself a liberal, does not fit the category very well, and he holds many of the ideas espoused by the opponents of liberalism. Young is a confused and, therefore to one reading him, confusing thinker, but in the college newspapers of the early 1950s the articulators of views contrary to standard liberalism are few and far between, so we must take them where and as we find them. In a November 6 piece, he states, “I imagine that if you, went to every person on this campus as an individual, you would find that all but a very few would truthfully state that he is liberal in his entire conception and philosophy of life.” The implication here is that among the student body at the University of New Hampshire, liberalism was the norm. So, what does Young conceive this liberalism to be? He is reasonably explicit: it is a belief in “democratic

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principles based on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Four Freedoms.” Elsewhere he is more expansive, saying that liberalism “connotes all the basic philosophies and beliefs that man intuitively adheres to,” including “justness, understanding and tolerance.”37 Furthermore, it includes opposition to “the hierarchy of any minority over a mass, or mass over a minority.” This presumably means that minority groups and majority groups have no right to oppress one another. However, he complains, people who call themselves liberals only adhere to these values in action when they act as individuals; put one of them into a group and “he will fight and bicker and viciously support his own special interests. He will suppress minorities and malevolently discriminate against them. . . . He will lose too easily his individuality in the hysteria of the mass.” And what are the consequences of such tendencies? “Within a few years, we can very easily find ourselves submerged in the viciousness and despotism of communism or Fascism”; we might even “end up as nonentities or automatons or nonexistent.”38 In another, earlier piece Young expounds his worldview at a more fundamental level. He denounces a civilization that has assigned too much value to logic and has become a slave to logic. He writes, “Great is the cause of logic. A tremendous civilization has evolved from purely logical processes. Our whole existence depends on analytical deduction, seduction, and reduction. We are born, eat, and marry, or not, for logical production. Our tom-toms pound in measured beat at the altar of reason. Science is our man made God. We worship it in analytical sequence: Hail to thee being of Wrath. Bow down to thee inspiring Atom.” So, what is the problem with logic? “It is tremendous in its appalling lack of knowledge of that which transcends man. It is terrific in its amazing ignorance of man’s intuitive processes. It is awe inspiring in its lack of understanding of man’s willing to be decent, kind, and good.” It is not that logic has no value to Young (“There is no doubt of the place of logic in our lives”), it is just that in his view a means has become an end, usurping the place of the proper ends of human existence. This is not the skepticism of a Reinhold Niebuhr, who doubts, not logic, but the human capacity to be logical.39 Rather, echoing Rousseau and Romanticism generally, Young believes that “[l]ogic throttles intuition,” a position in contradiction to the essential rationalism of liberalism. At this point in his piece there is a sudden jump as he turns to a denunciation of unspecified “minorities” (as we have already seen, always a source of concern). He writes, “Fearful minorities, your end is destruction, not elevation.” These minorities could be African Americans; they could be Jews; they could be both. In any case they are groups who have been receiving a raw deal because Young continues, “Long society has made you suffer. Now in retribution all mankind suffers. This is not your right to do. Too long have you reveled in the self-glorification of your prosecutions [sic].” He goes on to urge these whiners to get over themselves: “Tell

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me of your surrounding evils? I tell you of your instinctive good. Tell me of your lack of opportunity? I say, damn you, make your opportunities.” And now he gets to his positive vision of humanity, writing, “Man is man. Take away his trappings, stand him naked before you, he is still man.” The “minorities” are included since [u]niversally, your appearance varies but little [from that of other people]. Your emotions are similar. Your intellect on par. Why do you fear? Why do you force the oppressions? Why do you manifest superiority through a false inferiority? How dare you to submit? What makes you feel so different? You have no right to! You as man epitomize man. Exist as man, welcome man and you will be man. Your minority will become non-existent. The fault is yours, but if the courage, willingness, and fortitude is yours, then there shall be and must be a universal man. He that stays in the valley will never get over the hill.40 All the paradoxes of radical individualism are present in this disquisition: the essentially important thing is the individual person. Adverse circumstances, if they exist (this is not explicitly stated), are to be overcome, not to be complained about. If you can’t “get over the hill,” it’s your own fault because you chose to “stay in the valley,” presumably because of personal failings, i.e., lacking “courage, willingness, and fortitude.” The entire weight of life then, the entire responsibility for it, rests on oneself. All this implies that circumstances—context—are nothing. It is the essential quality of being that is all. This accounts for the denunciation of logic, then, since logic deals with relationships, but Young’s view has essentially eradicated the entire notion of relationship. Individuality is essential, untouchable by external circumstances. However, the irony of this position is that it leads to the positing of a “universal man.” The question is how is one “universal man” to be distinguished from another? If all share the same essence, is there, can there be, any difference between one and another? Is there any room for difference?

Conclusion It seems fair to say that by 1947 at least some students believed that a full-fledged “red scare” was underway, and, indeed, in this chapter we have seen familiar phenomena associated with red scares, including Allison Broatch’s use of innuendo to launch an attack on Eugene Lehman’s loyalty, assertions that at the University of New Hampshire a student or students were approached to spy on their professors, Bob Young’s own ex officio communist hunting, assertions of his connections with the FBI (and, indeed, if Carol Foster, housewife and mother of two, of Nashua, New Hampshire, could be recruited to infiltrate, as she was, the

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Communist Party of New Hampshire, why should it be beyond credulity that Bob Young may have had the connections he claimed?), Young’s apparent efforts to impress and frighten Gredler with those connections, and also Young’s apparent use of guilt by association as a tool of intimidation (telling Gredler that it was “dangerous and bad” to be seen with certain people). In all this we see a tone, an atmosphere, of the mysteriously threatening, a threat that is aimed at one’s beliefs and thoughts, and for liberals the menace does not seem to come from communists but from those who claim to be most committed to opposing communism. Also, some of the main responses to this perceived or actual threat have been delineated. Liberals are taking a cautious, defensive tone, making sure that when they discuss anything to do with communism, or that might seem to have to do with communism, they include a disclaimer. Liberals are also starting to complain that they perceive a growing tendency for those who are not liberals to conflate liberalism with communism and that in the process liberal issues are being smeared as communist issues. This silences debate regarding effective remedies for real social and economic problems, and as a result, America’s ability to deal with those problems in an effective way is being impeded. College liberals are also beginning to put forward an analysis that suggests that hampering effective remedies to social ills actually perpetuates communism inasmuch as people are most likely to turn to communism when democratic capitalism fails to address their problems. An April 10 editorial in The New Hampshire warned that “[t]he American, people today are face to face with a familiar but none the less terrifying phenomenon—post-war reaction” and went on to say, “The danger to this country and to the world from the spread of Communism is obvious to any thinking citizen. But, is there not even greater danger in starting upon a grandiose witchhunt to root out this cancerous growth? Must we jeopardize our civil liberties, our personal freedom to fight an alien propaganda?”41 And an October 16 editorial in The New Hampshire entitled “Let’s Keep Our Ideals” explicitly expresses the concern that “[d]ue to the prevalent Red scare we are too apt to label as a ‘Commie’ or ‘Red’ anyone who advocates a change in some aspects of our government.”42 This will be the main concern of anticommunist liberals throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. The editorial then lays out the whole dilemma from the anticommunist liberal perspective. It starts out with an acknowledgement that “[i]n the past few years it has become increasingly evident that Communism is attempting to foster its doctrines not only upon Europe but the whole world.” Given this fact, the author believes it to be a good thing that the American people seem to have abandoned their traditional isolationism and, in becoming more interested in the spread of democracy, have developed “an earnest resolution to fight any efforts by Communistic-minded groups to propound their theories.”

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But, he warns, there is danger since “In certain instances, we are employing the very methods advocated and enforced by those totalitarian nations of which we have such an abhorrence.” He reminds the reader of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and that among those is the freedom of speech. So, how are we to fight totalitarian regimes of the right and left if not by suppression (the methods of those we deplore)? The answer is open discussion, a theme liberals come back to again and again: allow communists and fascists to have their say, freely and openly; then “[l]et us speak our own minds and destroy, one by one, the points upheld by those foreign to our way of thinking. The way to attack this issue properly is not by suppression but by facing it squarely and besting it at every turn. That way, doubts may be settled and the situation cleared.”43 And as the earlier editorial says, America has come a long way under the belief that the truth is strong enough to stand against all comers. Now is hardly the time to throw this down the drain and yield to mob hysteria. As long as this nation maintains true freedom of speech, as long as every man is free to speak his mind, we don’t have to worry about Communism or Fascism or Nazism or any other isms. Give them enough rope and they’ll strangle on their own warped ideas and their own lies. There’s no room in this country for any kind of Inquisition in governmental employment methods and there’s less room for self-righteous condemnation of anything “different,” “liberal,” “leftist,” etc.44 In an era in which the professional liberal intellectuals, notably Niebuhr and Schlesinger, were losing much of the liberal’s optimism regarding the positive transformative quality of reason, here we see the college liberal as the true child of the Enlightenment, possessing a fundamental faith that human beings are reasonable creatures and that reason is the most potent tool for settling social unrest. And if reason is the answer, it can only mean that logical error is the problem. If people do wrong or bad things, it is because of incomplete information or faulty logic. Education, then, is the ultimate social cure. There is no other use for reason than to correct error, and there is no other way to correct error than through reason. Therefore, Richard Pinkevich writes regarding the Marder incident, the threat that is “far more rampant and destructive than communism or fascism” is “the threat of ignorance, the threat of too little thinking:” This is the “true threat from within.”45 Red baiting, however, precludes the application of reason to problems by conflating all left of center approaches under the label of “commie.” Joe Tudisco of the University of Connecticut attacks this problem when he writes, “The ‘Communist issue’ has assumed such great proportions that even the liberals and progressives are afraid to mention the word

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‘Communist’ for fear of being labeled ‘Red’ or ‘Redbaiter,’ whichever the case may be. This is unfortunate because it discourages honest expression of opinion on issues of vital importance.” Tudisco then continues to ask why communism is becoming more and more popular all over the world. Is it because of the superiority and the virtues of Communist doctrines and policies? Or is it because of the ills and vices of existing “orders”? I think it’s because of the latter reason. When we have remedied the existing ills and vices, then—and only then—will we have an effective “check” on the spreading Communism.46 The plausibility of this argument is reinforced by the complaint of Alfred J. Washington, Jr., an African-American student at the University of Connecticut who, when complaining about the status of civil rights for minorities at the university, finished by saying, “Just for the record, I am not a Communist Party member or a member of the A.Y.D. (although I find pitifully few other organizations open to me here other than those labeled pink or red). I might say that I’m just a Black American citizen of Connecticut (an independent voter) who had hoped to better himself through study and associations at the University of Connecticut.”47 Repressive action, Tudisco says, is undemocratic and also counterproductive. It does not eradicate the evil but only drives it underground; he claims the support of history in this view, although he does not mention specific historical examples that would support him. This theme of what is democratic and what is not is also critical to liberals who tend to agree that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. This is linked to their optimistic view of human nature and their faith in its ultimate quality of reasonability.

Notes 1. Investigation of Communist Activities in the New England Area, Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fifth Congress, second session, March 21, 1958. 2. The Hartford Courant, March 25, 1947, 1. 3. The Connecticut Campus, March 10, 1947, 2. 4. The Connecticut Campus, March 7, 1947, 2. 5. Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 85. 6. The Connecticut Campus, March 14, 1947, 2. 7. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo (D-Mississippi), notorious racist, was outspoken in his belief that African Americans should be disenfranchised in all 48 states. He also introduced bills to provide funds for the deportation of black Americans to Liberia and wrote a book entitled Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization, which advocated this idea. 8. The Fair Employment Practices Committee: on June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 creating the Fair Employment Practices

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

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Committee (FEPC). The order banned racial discrimination in any defense industry receiving federal contracts by declaring “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” The order also empowered the FEPC to investigate complaints and take action against alleged employment discrimination. FDR’s sudden death and the war’s end left the FEPC in limbo. Congress, receiving mixed messages from the Truman administration, split over how best to address the issue and debated whether to extend the FEPC for a few years, make it a permanent commission, or not renew its charter. ER lent very active support to the bill creating a permanent FEPC. The Senate disagreed and let the FEPC die in 1946. However, FEPC congressional supporters refused to yield and twice introduced bills calling for a permanent FEPC. Both bills failed. Harry Ward, Professor of Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary, spoke at an AYD-sponsored program on October 17, 1946. His subject was “Towards a Lasting Peace.” The controversy arose because Ward, who had been an activist in left-liberal circles for decades, was also a prominent and persistent apologist for the Soviet Union. Ward served as professor of Christian ethics at the Union Theological Seminary and chairman of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union for two decades. He also became a leader in labor groups, Protestant activist organizations, and New York intellectual circles. The American League for Peace and Democracy (ALPD) was the foremost group representing Americans who worked for peace in the 1930s on the basis of antifascism rather than pacifism. It also was the most important organization within the antifascist, pro-Soviet Popular Front of the Great Depression. Ward, a prominent clergyman and activist in left-liberal circles for decades, was the ALPD’s chair from 1934 until its dissolution in 1940 following the Nazi–Soviet nonaggression pact. For more on Ward, see Doug Rossinow, “The Model of a Model Fellow Traveler”: Harry F. Ward, the American League for Peace and Democracy, and the “Russian Question” in American Politics, 1933–1956 and also David Nelson Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx: Harry F. Ward and the Struggle for Social Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003). The Connecticut Campus, March 18, 1947, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.; The Connecticut Campus, March 21, 1947, 2. This was, in fact, a period when a number of universities and colleges were moving against AYD on their campuses. John Elliott Rankin (March 29, 1882–November 26, 1960) was a Democratic congressman from the US state of Mississippi who served 16 terms (March 4, 1921–January 3, 1953) as Mississippi’s First District Representative. Rankin was a strong supporter of the New Deal, coauthoring the bill to create the Tennessee Valley Authority and supporting the Rural Electrification Administration, but he was also a racial demagogue and antisemite who spoke up for segregation and white supremacy. Rankin was prominent on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he paid careful attention to possible communist infiltration into the Federal Writer’s Project while justifying the Committee’s failure to investigate the Ku Klux Klan with the comment, “After all, the KKK is an old American institution.” The Connecticut Campus, March 28, 1947, 2. Ibid. The Connecticut Campus, April 8, 1947, 2.

48 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

Student vs. Student Ibid. Ibid. The Connecticut Campus, April 18, 1947, 2. The Connecticut Campus, April 8, 1947, 2. Ibid. The Connecticut Campus, April 11, 1947, 2. The Connecticut Campus, April 15, 1947, 2. The Connecticut Campus, April 22, 1947, 2. Ibid. The Connecticut Campus, May 13, 1947, 2. John Rankin (D-MI) played an important role in establishing the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) as a standing committee in Congress in February 1945. The New Hampshire, January 23, 1947, 2. J. Parnell Thomas became Chairman of HUAC in 1946. He was convicted of fraud in 1950 and resigned his seat in Congress. The New Hampshire, November 6, 1947, 1. Our understanding of the precise events that follow is hampered by the fact that the University of New Hampshire has no record of it and barely has any record of the Liberal Club itself despite its prominence on campus, at least as reflected in the pages of The New Hampshire. One piece of information that we do have is that in HUAC hearings conducted in 1958 on communist activities in the New England area, a Charles Chase, said in testimony before the committee to have been a student at the University of New Hampshire around this time, was identified by one Carol Harris Foster—herself having acted as an undercover agent for the FBI—as a member of the State Committee of the Communist Party of New Hampshire. This may or may not have been the same Charles Chase who cosigned the letter mentioned with Gilbert Gredler; certainly it seems likely that it was. There is nothing in any material that I have seen to indicate that Gredler or the Liberal Club was in any way associated with any communist association. Based on the testimony before the Committee, actual communist activity associated with the university seems to have been minimal. Foster mentions an interest on the part of Party members in recruiting professors around the time that the Progressive Citizens of America, the forerunner of the Progressive Party, was established in southern New Hampshire. When asked if the PCA was “controlled by the conspiracy in New Hampshire,” Foster merely answers that “[t]here were people in it who belonged to the Communist Party.” We can infer that the effort to make university connections had little success since the Committee does not pursue the topic. The New Hampshire, November 6, 1947, 3. The New Hampshire, November 13, 1947, 3. The New Hampshire, November 20, 1947, 7. Ibid. The New Hampshire, November 6, 6. Niebuhr had some optimism as to the moral capacities of individuals but cautioned that “in every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulses, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.” Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: HarperCollins, 1932). The New Hampshire, October 23, 1947, 2. The New Hampshire, April 10, 1947, 2. The New Hampshire, October 16, 1947, 3.

Student vs. Student 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Ibid. The New Hampshire, April 10, 1947, 4. The Connecticut Campus, April 8, 1947, 2. The Connecticut Campus, March 28, 1947, 2. The Connecticut Campus, April 22, 1947, 2.

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2

War by Other Means

War is nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means. Karl von Clausewitz1 It is bad language that is destroying our democracy. Lou Gerson2

A Controversy at the University of Connecticut Although the University of Connecticut at Storrs passed through the McCarthy era in relative peace, it was not unaffected by the political tensions of the period. The state of Connecticut had adopted a sedition law that made it a criminal offense to propagate “scurrilous or abusive matter, concerning the form of government in the United States, its military forces, flag or uniforms” or to advocate before ten or more persons any measure “intended to injuriously affect the government of the United States or the State of Connecticut,”3 and the student newspaper, The Connecticut Campus, commented more than once on the “air of conventionality and conformity among the students on this campus,” attributing it to “the present hysteria caused by the overzealous guardianship of our liberties and life.”4 Nonetheless, student and faculty concerns about McCarthystyle political repression or, less commonly, the “communist threat” were aired fairly frequently in The Campus. Therefore, the exchange that took place in the wake of the December 7, 1951, publication of an article that described two talks on the dangers of fascism by guest speaker Gordon Hall to a group of political science students was not unusual. Hall was the director of the Frances Sweeney Committee (an organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism), an independent investigator of extreme right-wing groups, and publisher and editor of a monthly magazine, Countertide, dedicated to exposing groups on the extreme right. In his lectures he told the students at UConn that while the threat of communism to the United States was overrated, Americans were “seriously overlooking fascism, the real threat to American government today.” Citing information gathered from Gerald L. K. Smith’s National

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Christian Crusade (which Hall had infiltrated)5 and the Ku Klux Klan, Hall informed his audience that “the fascists are consolidating their position in this country, because in a period of unrest, uncertainty and hysteria, they find the kind of moral climate in which they flourish.” He also deplored the tendency of the political right to conflate liberals, socialists, and communists, pointing out that many Americans who had nothing to do with the Communist Party had been intimidated into silence for fear of being branded communists.6 As one example of the groups that he believed to be fascistic and a danger to the country’s civil liberties, Hall mentioned the Minute Women of the USA, a group with branches in Connecticut and several other New England states. Founded in Connecticut in 1949 by Belgian-born sculptress Suzanne Silvercruys Stevenson, the Minute Women comprised mostly upper-middle-class, Republican women “prepared to devote their time to supporting right-wing candidates for office, harassing speakers held to be communistic, bombarding elected officials with letter and telephone calls, and maintaining a surveillance of local communities for signs of ‘un-American activities.’”7 Hall argued that the Minute Women were part of a broad informal network of fascistic and racist organizations; here he stressed their ties with Southern Dixiecrats, saying, “You can apply the label of ‘states rights’ to the Dixiecrat movement if you wish, but in the South this is still white supremacy and intimidation of the Negro.”8 The article closed with a quotation from one of Hall’s talks that was to have further repercussions, setting off the exchange of letters analyzed in this chapter. He said: The husband of Suzanne Silvercruys Stevenson, national leader of the Minute Women, is, despite his age [he was 57], a member of the freshman class at Uconn [sic] . . . A firm supporter of his wife’s organization, it is hoped that Stevenson is not doing a reportorial job on the “Reds” at Uconn for the Minute Women. It should be remembered that the Minute Women are dedicated to “ferreting” out “Reds” in colleges and universities.9 Hall’s singling out of Colonel Edward Stevenson angered a UConn student, Bob Steiner, who wrote an angry letter condemning Hall for having “slammed a decent American citizen who has given more for his country than most . . . We have had pink fellow travelers, like Hall, on this campus before, and I have always believed in freedom of speech, therefore I say let them speak.” However, he went on to say that while previous politically left speakers like Mrs. Paul Robeson and Owen Lattimore had criticized American institutions, unlike “this dope Hall” they had not singled out individuals. Citing Stevenson’s record of service in two wars, Steiner asked, “What have you done, Mr. Hall?” Then Steiner changed tack and wrote, “Let me ask you another question, Mr. Hall. How many

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organizations do you belong to or have you belonged to that are listed as subversive by the attorney general?” Maintaining his abhorrence of racism, Steiner declared: I might add that equal rights for all people in our country is gradually coming about despite Communists’ criticizing our democracy . . . In short Mr. Hall, if you’re going to try to sling your “bull” around here, why don’t you use some other method than the one used by Communists [sic] stooges!10 The conflict widened when Suzanne Silvercruys Stevenson was interviewed by The Campus’s managing editor, Carl Callum, at her home in Chaplin, CT. Mrs. Stevenson painted a picture of her organization that was at odds with Hall’s description, claiming, “The only thing we’re opposed to is loss of individual liberties. We’re against fascism just as much as we’re against Communism.” She affirmed that the Minute Women were “dedicated to ferreting out Communists” in universities, pulling out papers that contained the “latest figures” on Communist Party enrollment and telling Callum that “[t]here are over 50,000 registered members of the Communist party . . . who concentrate on hitting colleges because they want to contaminate young people. . . . There are practically no universities free of communist activity.” Nonetheless, she denied that her husband’s presence at UConn had anything to do with surveillance. She also denied any connection with the Dixiecrats (“We are definitely for states’ rights, but that does not eliminate our support of civil rights”) and told Callum that, far from conflating liberalism with communism, “[w]e never mention liberalism in any of our literature.”11 Different aspects of this affair inspired more letters from students. Jack Moidel, whose other articles and letters in The Campus show him to have been somewhat left of center,12 came out in defense of Colonel Stevenson, calling him a “fine gentleman” who had been the victim of “thought control, guilt by association, character assassination, and circumstantial evidence.” At the heart of Moidel’s letter was sadness about “the intolerant atmosphere existing on this campus and throughout the world.”13 Robert Gerich, who had actually attended the talks in question, came to Hall’s defense. Gerich pointed out that Hall had not accused Stevenson of being on campus for the purpose of spying but had merely mentioned it as a possibility. Gerich criticized Steiner for, on the one hand, claiming that Hall had smeared Stevenson and, on the other hand, smearing Hall himself as a “pink fellow traveler.” In Gerich’s view Steiner’s fault and the fault in much of American political discourse were a widespread tendency to speak out of emotion rather than from “honest thinking.”14 Shortly thereafter Hall himself undertook to respond to Steiner’s letter. He pointed out that he (Hall) had criticized Colonel Stevenson, not on the basis of his marriage to the head of the Minute Women (this was one

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of Steiner’s charges) but on the basis of Stevenson’s “firm support” for that organization. Addressing Steiner’s readiness “to equate serving in the Armed Forces with patriotism,” Hall noted that he had served three years in the US Army Air Forces during World War II and had participated in the 1942 campaign in the Aleutian Islands. He denied Steiner’s suggestion that he (Hall) might belong to any organizations listed by the Attorney General and followed up with another thrust at the Minute Women, pointing out that an organization called “American Patriots, Inc.” was on that list as both “fascist” and “subversive”; this organization had been actively defended by the Minute Women in its October 1951 newsletter, a defense augmented by an attack on McCall’s magazine, which had documented the activities of the American Patriots. Moving back to Steiner, Hall pointed out that Steiner’s letter exemplified the very phenomenon he (Hall) had deplored in his lectures, i.e., the tendency to “lump liberals, Communists, and socialists, into one neat package.” Finally, he promised that in a future letter he would document his charges against the Minute Women.15 Steiner struck back at Hall, accusing him of “the old trick of twisting facts and confusing issues in order to make people believe he is right.” However, despite the aggressive tone of his letter, Steiner was clearly now on the defensive, claiming that his criticism of Hall was “based solely on the fact that you slammed Ned Stevenson” who was “just another college student with a lot of homework like the rest of us.” However, he could not resist coming back to an insinuation that Hall was politically tainted, suggesting that Hall arrange a debate with Mrs. Stevenson so that UConn students “may judge who is a ‘fascist’ and who is a ‘pink fellow traveler.’”16 Nearly a month later, on February 8, 1952, Hall’s promised exposé of the Minute Women was printed in The Campus, and in an extended letter he effectively demonstrated that the Minute Women were on the far right of Northern public opinion. Hall returned to the McCall’s magazine article that he had mentioned in his response to Steiner. The article, entitled “Who’s Trying to Ruin Our Schools?” by Arthur D. Morse, had constituted an exposé of “the self-appointed guardians of education” and had made prominent mention of Allen Zoll, the executive vice-president of the National Council for American Education. Hall pointed out that General Jonathan M. Wainwright, Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg, heavyweight champion Gene Tunney, and Stanley High, a Reader’s Digest editor—none of them liberals—had all quit Zoll’s organization because they had found it to be “tainted with Fascism.” Hall went on to reiterate the fact that an earlier group directed by Zoll, American Patriots, Inc., had been listed by the Attorney General of the United States as both fascist and subversive. Zoll—who had been a fascist before World War II and would have a long career in antisemitic and anticommunist groups—had gone on to become the head of an organization, the National Council for American Education,

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which supplied speakers who addressed subjects such as “How Red Is the Little Red Schoolhouse?” and distributed pamphlets with titles like “They Want Your Child” and “Progressive Education Increases Delinquency.” He also wrote critiques of “un-American” textbooks and published the “Red-ucator Series” listing the alleged communist front affiliations of professors at leading colleges and universities.17 Beyond doubt, Zoll was a man of extreme views; Hall quotes him as saying during a debate at the Harvard Law School Forum on December 7, 1951, “I consider academic freedom undemocratic and I propose to abolish it.” In support of his assertion that the Minute Women did indeed attack liberals, Hall turned to its response to Arthur Morse’s McCall’s article, quoting its statement: “Mr. Morse and his so-called ‘liberal’ cohorts do not realize that they are the Pied Pipers of the 20th century, leading the oncoming generations to a human ant society.” Hall added that in its “vigorous” defense of Zoll the Minute Women plainly implied that even McCall’s (a magazine whose conservatism Hall repeatedly stressed) was “playing the Communist’s game.” To establish the Minute Women’s affinity for racists, Hall quoted an article by Mrs. Stevenson in which she warmly recommended as “must” reading a magazine called the Southern Conservative, edited by the “brilliant” Ida Darden.18 To demonstrate the racist nature of this publication, Hall quoted from the Southern Conservative: The Supreme Court, whose members have time and again demonstrated their strong prejudice against the white race, has made another “social decision” and one which clearly indicates that we are fast approaching the place where an American citizen, in order to get justice from our highest court, will have to first paint his face with a piece of burnt cork. Hall went on then to discuss the 1951 Minute Women’s Newsletter’s inclusion of excerpts from Edgar W. Waybright’s “racist pamphlet” entitled “The Other Plot to Destroy Our Constitution.” He described Waybright as the Imperial Wizard of the Southern Ku Klux Klan, stressing that this was not a secret but rather a fact that had been brought out in public by State Senator Patrick J. Ward of Hartford when appearing before the Federal and Inter-Governmental Relations Committee on April 5, 1951. Finally, to establish the Minute Women’s connection with the Dixiecrats, Hall quoted Mrs. Stevenson’s description of her “fairy tale” visit with Hugh Roy Cullen, a man described by Hall as both a contributor to the “anti-Semitic, anti-Negro publication Common Sense” and “one of the financial angels of the ‘Dixiecrat’ movement.” Five days later, on February 13, Richard Carleton Ward, a UConn student, brought a new angle to bear on the discussion, writing that if Hall’s insinuation that Colonel Stevenson might be at UConn to “ferret out

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Reds” were true, “there could be no better purpose in his being here.” Ward conceded that he had not seen “much evidence” of red activities in Storrs, but “it is well known that it is part of communist policy to corrupt the minds of idealist and bewildered youth, and there is no better place for this than a college.” Ward found textbooks to be a particular cause of concern, suggesting that they should be stripped of communistic influence and “be modernized by being made at every opportunity to expose communism for what it really is.” He finished with this inflammatory exhortation to his fellow students: Let us Uconnites free our University of all reds, if it has any. Let us Americans free the whole world of all communists. The only good communist is a dead communist, and then he is only good for lobster bait. Russia must be destroyed.19 Ward sought to arouse his fellow students, and he succeeded, though probably not quite in the way he had intended. Three letters came in, all appalled by the extreme views reflected in his peroration. R. G. Mead simply and briefly wanted to know how Ward proposed to “accomplish this desirable objective without starting World War III or losing a single American soldier.”20 Ralph Bohm wondered if Ward, while “ferreting out Reds,” would be “equally as anxious to change places with some loyal teacher who might have to work from day to day with the everominous threat of losing his job simply because some self-appointed guardian of the democratic principles might develop a dislike for him.” Regarding Ward’s proposed destruction of Russia, Bohm asked, “What kind of warped thinking is this? I agree that Communism must be wiped out, but to slaughter 200 million people and destroy over 8 million square miles of territory . . . in trying to do so, that seems something that deserves a little more thought.”21 A. Michael Pite worried that people generally were far too willing to think of war as a way to resolve differences. Claiming that US policy under the Truman administration had been to “buy off the world,” sending “arms the world over” and shipping out our “own men to fight in a God-forsaken hole,” Pite figuratively cried out, “Wake up Connecticut! Wake up World! Instead of war, look to peace. Instead of destroying, let us build and teach others to build. . . . Stop war talk! It leads to war. I don’t want to fight or die. Do you?”22 Ward soon replied to his critics, claiming that his exhortation to destroy Russia had been meant figuratively, not literally. He suggested that, in fact, “the Russians would be the first people to want to help us to overthrow their masters.” He emphasized, however, that it “should be clear by now that we cannot deal with communists over conference tables and that MacArthur’s policy was right.” After declaring his own preference

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for death rather than have “our country run or overrun by communists,” Ward defiantly repeated his slogan: “Russia must be destroyed.”23 Within a few days another student, Mendel Heilig, responded to Ward’s second letter. Heilig pointed out that though it had been “most difficult” to reach an understanding with the Soviet Union, there was an important distinction to be made between negotiation and appeasement. However, he went on, “the three ‘M’s’ [McCarthy, Mundt, and McCarran?] along with some neurotic women’s organizations [presumably the Minute Women] often do as much harm to clear thinking as our foreign antagonist, Russia.” He went on to address Ward’s concern about the US becoming “overrun” by communists, saying that “internal elements who are rightist chauvinists” constituted as great a threat to democracy as the communists.24 Responding to Heilig, Ward insisted that negotiations with the Soviet Union were futile since “the only language that communists understand is that which is blasted from the muzzle of a gun.” He continued with an argument that was central to hardline anticommunist thinking: “It should be clear also that it is their policy to enslave all of mankind. We do not try to reach an understanding with the potato-bugs in our fields; we kill them. That is sometimes the only way to solve the problem of dealing with creatures which are beyond the reach of reason.” After a brief digression, he returned with a paragraph on the nature of communism. He admitted that Heilig was right about the danger posed by “rightist chauvinists” but insisted that communists belonged in that category: “the only important and dangerous fascist power in the world at present is the Soviet Union.” Ward closed with his trademark phrase: “Russia must be destroyed.”25 A few days later a letter was printed signed “H. Welborn (American).” Welborn seems to have been particularly offended by Ward’s emphatic style. This mocking letter had nothing substantive in it, but restricted itself to a satirical adoration of those “Champion[s] of Democracy and Righteousness” like Ward in whom lay “the hope of a suffering world.”26 This, however, drew a response from James D. Robertson “(Flag Waver),” a friend or acquaintance of Ward’s, who defended Ward on the basis of (1) “the many years of service [he] gave to this country,” (2) the fact that Ward “understands the people about whom he speaks, to the point where he can speak their language, Russian, fluently,” and (3) the fact that Ward’s wife had to flee Russia (presumably she was Russian), leaving her family behind to an unknown fate. Robertson implicitly acknowledged that Ward had a tendency to overstate his case, suggesting “he was goaded into it by more opposition than he expected.” Still, Ward was a “sincere patriot” who “would die for the cause of freedom,” and the country would be better off with more Carl Wards because “they at least appreciate what they have—and will . . . fight . . . to keep it.”27

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Meanwhile, there had been other responses to the Hall brouhaha. A letter whose author was not a student but rather a Minute Woman named Mildred W. Church was published in which the writer expressed her deep resentment of Hall’s “unkind criticism” of and “vicious attack” on the Stevensons. Ms. Church assured the readers that Mrs. Stevenson “would not knowingly affiliate with anyone who is antidemocratic.” To the contrary, she (Ms. Church) had known Mrs. Stevenson “to entertain colored people in her own home.” Ms. Church protested that if the Minute Women did not attack fascism, it was only because “we did not think it was active in this country.” She went on to affirm, “I believe Communism, fascism and socialism are all dangerous and the ideal form of government for this country is a democracy.” Church finished up by wondering what Mr. Hall means by extreme rightists as anti-democratic. When I went to school I was taught that extreme rightists were conservative republicans. I should think that they might resent his choice of words.28 Along with the letter from Ms. Church, a missive had arrived from none other than Edgar W. Waybright, Sr., the putative “Imperial Wizard of the Southern Ku Klux Klan.” Suggesting that Hall was one with “slight regard for the truth,” Waybright had three main points to make: (1) he denied having any knowledge of the Minute Women; (2) he said that he had never heard of any organization called “The Southern Ku Klux Klan” and denied being an official or member of any Klan organization; and (3) he averred that his pamphlet, “The Other Plot to Destroy Our Constitution,” was merely sponsoring an amendment to the Constitution of the United States “designed to prevent treaties or conventions of the United Nations from superceding the Constitution of the United States,” adding that it “would take a mind warped beyond repair to call this pamphlet ‘racist,’ ‘vulgar’ or ‘filthy.’”29 In response to the Waybright letter, Hall undertook to substantiate his charges concerning Waybright’s Klan connections. He quoted two newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Jacksonville-American, both of which explicitly linked Waybright with the Klan. Regarding Waybright’s pamphlet, “The Other Plot to Destroy Our Constitution,” Hall quoted the official organ of Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Crusade, The Cross and Flag, which lauded Waybright’s pamphlet for warning “America of the Genocide Convention treat which would . . . make all of us who oppose Zionist control and who favor segregation, international criminals to be indicted and convicted and incarcerated by foreigners.”30 Waybright was sufficiently stung by this reply to enter the fray once more. He sought to discredit Hall’s “scatter-brained argument” by attacking his sources, ignoring the St. Louis-Dispatch, but calling the

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Jacksonville-American a “guttersnipe scandal sheet” that ran the story when he (Waybright) ran for Chairman of the Duval County Democratic executive committee. The burden of Waybright’s refutation was that the vote was 101 for him and three for his opponent, and that “when a person must rely upon scandal sheets which carry no weight in their community to sustain his charge, he is an unreliable and irresponsible speaker.” He closed by declaring, “I am not an officer or member of any Klan group.”31 Finally, a letter had come in from a student named Arthur Sherwood that assailed Hall on several fronts. Sherwood had gone to the trouble of doing some research on Hall and had a series of four questions for which he requested answers so that the “audience” at this “debate” could make accurate judgments based on what they knew about the “two debaters and their reliability and credibility.” These questions (treated in detail in the following text) sought to bring Hall’s credibility into question. Hall’s detailed rebuttal of Sherwood’s veiled charges brought this series of letters to a close.32

A Closer Look, Part One: The Hall Letters It is clear that there is an argument going on in these documents, but it is not immediately clear what the argument is about. It is not an argument about the merits or demerits of communism: everybody engaged seems to agree that communism is a bad thing. It is not an argument about what seems to be put forward as the opposite of communism, democracy: everybody seems to agree that democracy is a good thing, although it is not clear that if they were to discuss it, everyone would agree about what democracy is. What, then, is at issue? Two points: (1) how to defend democracy, and (2) what represents the biggest threat to it. No participant in this debate disputes that the Soviet Union is an enemy. They also generally agree that there is an internal enemy; the disagreement is over who that internal enemy is. These letters show the grassroots participation in the effort to define, identify, and disable the “enemy from within.” Those on the right seek to brand liberals with a different “color”—be it red or pink—which in “color conscious” America is tantamount to branding them as a different race, i.e., as the other. Those on the left respond with an effort to discredit the legitimacy of their opponents by attacking their methods as antidemocratic; since one’s allegiance to democracy seems to be the one unifying theme that makes one recognizably “American,” branding an opponent as antidemocratic is also tantamount to branding them as alien. The theme favored by the liberals tends to be that one cannot protect democracy (i.e., freedom) with antidemocratic methods and that those who attempt to do so are as great a threat to freedom as the Soviet Union itself. The letters fall into two groups: (1) those defending and those attacking Gordon Hall and (2) those written by and in response to Richard

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Ward. In almost all of them we find not merely an effort to offer and refute arguments, but also an attempt to undermine, to harm, and even, in a sense, to destroy individual persons. It begins with Hall’s casting suspicion on Colonel Stevenson as a possible spy. It is not clear how serious Hall was in making this suggestion; he himself later wrote that his criticism of Stevenson was founded on his (Stevenson’s) “firm support of his wife’s organization.”33 However, it would not have been altogether unreasonable to suppose that a student (especially one with such personal ties to an organization like the Minute Women) might be gathering information on professors. After all, the Houston branch of the Minute Women, fearing that advocates of progressive education in the College of Education in the University of Houston were indoctrinating students, would soon plant members in classes to spy on professors whose loyalty they doubted. And in 1954, The Campus ran a series drawn from an article in the magazine The Reporter by Washington Editor Douglass Cater chronicling the undercover activities of Robert Munger, founder of Students for America, a group whose student members were directed “to take notes and direct quotations from the lectures of those professors who consistently insert Communist and socialist propaganda into the classroom.” Nonetheless, however reasonable Hall’s suspicions may have been, the fact remains that in a public forum he cast unsubstantiated suspicion on an individual, setting a tone of personal attack for the ensuing exchange. Steiner’s response escalated the debate to the realm of outright accusation. The second paragraph of his letter begins “We have had pink fellow travelers, like Hall, on this campus before, and I have always believed in freedom of speech, therefore I say let them speak.” The structure of this sentence is of some interest; ostensibly the purpose of the statement is to establish that the author, Steiner, is a person of broad views and, more importantly, committed to core democratic values such as freedom of speech. However, equally important is the presupposition contained in the opening clause: whereas Hall suggests that Stevenson might be acting as a spy, Steiner simply slips in as established fact the statement that Hall is a “pink fellow traveler,” without adducing any evidence to support a serious damning accusation. The reader is thus being set up to accept unconsciously an unverified assumption that will influence his or her interpretation of what is to follow. The next sentences of Steiner’s letter read, “During the past years I can remember such people as Mrs. Paul Robeson and Owen Lattimore. These people had criticisms to make too, but when they criticized any organization or the head of that organization, they didn’t bring in the rest of the family simply because they were related to each other.” This reinforces the presupposition that Hall is a “pink fellow traveler” by putting him in the same category as two prominent and controversial people: the wife of Paul Robeson—whose husband was unquestionably a communist sympathizer—and Professor Lattimore—who was smeared as

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a communist sympathizer. Both the Robesons and Lattimore were associated in the public mind, rightly or wrongly, with the Communist Party. Then Steiner goes on to make a seemingly innocuous but revealing connection: “These people had criticisms to make too.” A review of the entire letter reveals that this is one of two possible foundations for labeling Hall a “pink fellow traveler”; moreover, by associating the activity of “making criticisms” with reputed or actual communists, it sets up an association between liberal or left of center criticism of the right and being a communist. Again, this is put in the form of a presupposition that is difficult to pin down and is, therefore, difficult to respond to. Note that Hall’s “criticisms” as stated in the article are directed at right-wing groups, not at the United States, United States officials, or United States policy. From here Steiner moves to a different form of attack, the inquisitorial question that implies “we all know the answer, and it’s not a creditable one.” First, he asks Hall what he had done to serve his country militarily (clearly, Steiner believed the answer would be “not much, if anything”). Then he goes on to ask, “How many organizations do you belong to or have you belonged to that are listed as subversive by the attorney general?” This is a closed question inasmuch as its real intention is to narrow Hall to a “yes” or “no” response (“I do [don’t] belong to organizations listed as subversive by the Attorney General”). Furthermore, given the tone of aggressive attack that characterizes this letter as a whole, it is clear that the question is meant, if responded to, to force Hall into a damaging admission, i.e., that he does belong or has belonged to organizations on the Attorney General’s list. In the absence of a response from Hall, the letter would leave the implied smear in the mind of the readers. Hence, we can see that the question is actually an accusation. Here, however, Steiner opens himself up to a more direct recognition of his tactics and, therefore, an effective response. Hall does, in fact, respond to both these slightly veiled accusations in his next letter and does so in a way that Steiner finds to be unanswerable. Next, Steiner moves to Hall’s criticism of the Minute Women’s association with the “Dixiecrat movement.” First, as in the beginning of the letter, Steiner seeks to establish his own position as a qualified and impartial judge, writing, “I don’t like segregation of any people because of race. As far as I am concerned there is only one race, the human race.” Having tried to preemptively defend himself from any possible accusations of racism, Steiner then lectures Hall, saying, “you can’t ram civil rights down the throats of Southern whites or Negroes, and I might add that equal rights for all people in our country is gradually coming about despite Communists’ criticizing our democracy.” So here is the second possible basis for labeling Hall a “pink fellow traveler”; by bringing up the issue of racism at all, he is implicitly criticizing not just the United States but “our democracy”; ergo he must be against democracy, and ergo he must be a “pink fellow traveler.” Moreover, the use of the metaphor “ram civil rights

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down the throats” constitutes a suggestion of one who is willing to use brute force to accomplish his goals, however laudable. This reinforces the discrediting of communists and “pink fellow travelers” like Hall by accusing them of a willingness to use antidemocratic means to effect their goals. Finally, Steiner lets go his parting shot: “In short Mr. Hall, if you’re going to try to sling your ‘bull’ around here, why don’t you use some other method than the one used by Communists [sic] stooges!” In the absence of further specificity, one can only surmise that the methods “used by Communist stooges” are (1) “slamming decent American citizens” and (2) “criticizing our democracy.” Since this is left unspecified, however, given the tone of the entire letter, it seems fair to surmise that the real purpose of the paragraph is to imply that “Gordon Hall uses the methods of Communist stooges; therefore, he is a Communist stooge.” As related earlier, Hall replied in detail to Steiner’s charges convincingly enough to silence Steiner as to both Hall’s wartime credentials and his organizational affiliations. However, in his second letter Steiner opens by accusing Hall off sophistry: “Gordon Hall has resorted to the old trick of twisting facts and confusing issues in order to make people believe he is right.” Steiner then continues with a bald-facedly disingenuous statement of his own: “If you will read my letter of December 10, 1951 carefully, Mr. Hall, you will see that my criticism of you is based solely on the fact that you slammed Ned Stevenson, who is a decent American citizen.” He then goes on to find another way to accuse Hall of being in the category of political pariahs, writing, “I suggest you arrange a public debate with Mrs. Stevenson at Uconn so that the students may judge who is a ‘fascist’ and who is a ‘pink fellow traveler.’” The clear implication is that Mrs. Stevenson will be able to succeed where Steiner himself had failed, i.e., in establishing Hall as politically untrustworthy. There was one student response to Steiner’s initial attack on Hall, a letter from Robert Gerich. Gerich’s letter is free from personal innuendo, seeking only to address the substantive issues he found in Steiner’s letters; therefore, he concentrated on (1) the charge that Hall “slammed” Stevenson, (2) the charge that Hall was “pink,” and (3) the charge that Hall’s views were “bull.” Gerich defends Hall on the charge of denigrating Stevenson with the rather weak argument that Hall merely mentioned the fact that Stevenson might be writing a report on the students and professors without further comment. Gerich has either missed or chosen to ignore Hall’s clear implication that Stevenson could be spying, with all the associations (first and foremost, that of deception) that go with that activity. Next, Gerich addresses Steiner’s attack on Hall’s trustworthiness expressed in the statement “Mr. Hall, if you’re going to try to sling your ‘bull’ around here, why don’t you use some other method than the one used by Communists [sic] stooges!” Gerich’s first move is to cast doubt on Steiner’s authoritativeness as a commentator by asking rhetorically,

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“Did Mr. Steiner hear Mr. Hall at all?” Gerich—who attended the talks in question—then goes on to summarize the evidence that Hall had brought to show the dangerous character of the extreme right. This included recordings of speeches by people like Gerald L. K. Smith in which statements such as “Let’s keep America Christian” and “Mixed marriages . . . should be outlawed and considered a Federal offense” and “most newspapers are run by Jews and therefore are communistic” were greeted with “thunderous applause” by 6,000 people; it also included pamphlets advocating “America for the Americans,” “One race, one creed, one color,” and “All communists are Jews and all Jews are Communists.” Gerich argues that these recordings and pamphlets “spoke for themselves” and “backed up what Mr. Hall had to say in class. Therefore, where does the ‘bull’ stinging [sic] come in?” Finally, Gerich ascribes Steiner’s red baiting tactics to “emotion” and exhorts readers to “not start yelling ‘pink,’ ‘slammer,’ ‘bull stinger,’ [sic] and the like every time someone says something we don’t like,” but rather to “get at the real issues presented and put more honest thinking into our criticisms and less emotion.” The implications here are twofold: (1) that intellectual analysis is a more trustworthy guide to truth than emotionality, and (2) that socially charged labeling has become a substitute for accurate analysis and, more dangerously, that it is invoked against statements not because of their untruth, but because “we don’t like” them. Here Gerich raises the specter of the witch-hunt, a free-for-all of irresponsible, socially damaging accusations, irresponsible in that they are raised by private citizens against others merely because they “say something we don’t like.” The other main attack on Hall came from Arthur Sherwood, who began with a neutral proposition that is studiously reasonable: “I feel that the audience at any debate is always governed in their judgments by what they know about the two debaters and their reliability and credibility.” Then he proceeded to inform the reader that he had not “found it difficult to find out about Mrs. Stevenson,” that “her life is pretty much an open book; she is listed in Who’s Who in America and as National President of the Minute Women, her beliefs are well known.” Sherwood then turned to Hall, innocently suggesting that it “would be quite interesting to prospective listeners . . . to have more information about Mr. Hall’s background.” There is already a very subtle suggestion here that perhaps Hall’s life is not such an open book as Mrs. Stevenson’s. And this carries the equally subtle suggestion that perhaps there are reasons for this opacity. Sherwood then posed four questions, at least three of which were not open-ended but were rather directed to inconsistencies that Sherwood purported to have found. For the sake of clarity, Hall’s subsequent responses will be given along with each of Sherwood’s questions. First, Sherwood cited Hall’s letter of January 7, quoting it as saying, “I do not belong to a single organization listed as subversive, past or present.” However, Sherwood wrote, Hall had been interviewed by the

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New York Post on November 27, 1950, and at that time had said he had been a “member and an undercover agent for the ‘Friends of Democracy.’” Sherwood pointed out that the Friends of Democracy had been listed as a “Communist Front” by the Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate (Appendix 5, Page A-77). So, using classic guilt-by-association tactics, he asked, “Which statement is true?” In answering, Hall pointed out that Sherwood had misquoted him and thus had “muddied the waters brilliantly.” In fact, Hall’s letter to Steiner reads, “as regarding his query about my relationship to organizations listed as ‘subversive’ by the Attorney General of the United States [emphasis added], it happens that I do not belong to a single one, either past or present.” In support of this Hall quoted from a letter signed by John S. Wood, Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that explicitly said that the “Friends of Democracy has never been cited by this committee or by the Attorney-General as subversive or Communist.” Regarding the Senate’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Hall restricted himself to cryptically pointing out that a “Congressional sub-committee is not the same as the office of the Attorney-General.”34 The question here is whether Sherwood’s misrepresentation was careless or deliberate. Since Sherwood quoted Hall verbatim, though selectively, he probably had Hall’s letter before him. Sherwood also was clearly taking great care to find sources of information that might discredit his target. Appendix V (“Communist Front Affiliations of Persons Named in the Hearings, by Activity and Source”) of the Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary is not one of those documents that just leaps into one’s hands; it takes a little digging to get at it and quite a bit more to locate the by no means prominent references to the Friends of Democracy. The trouble Sherwood must have taken to find this citation suggests an effort that is far from casual; therefore, it seems reasonable to suppose that his reading of Hall’s article would not have been casual either. All of this suggests a deliberate distortion of Hall’s original statement. Next, Sherwood cited and asked for corroborating details concerning a Hartford Courant article that purportedly placed Hall at a meeting held “under the auspices of World Federalists” and stated, “Mr. Hall works with government investigators, investigating subversive organizations.” Hall replied that he had secured a copy of the Courant for the date in question and found no mention of any such statement. He went on to say, “I have never made any statement to the effect that I have worked with government investigators or with the government, and if any such line appears in print, I can’t be held responsible for it.” In fact, the Courant published two articles about Hall’s talk, one on February 9 announcing it and another on February 10. Neither article mentioned any connection

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between him and government at any level; rather, both identified him as an “independent investigator.”35 Sherwood’s third question was about a program mentioned in the Harvard Crimson in which Fulton Lewis, Jr. (the right-wing radio commentator who said, “To many Americans McCarthyism is Americanism,” and whom Richard Rovere dubbed “the official McCarthyite muezzin”)36 was said to have spent the entire time “castigating” him. Hall made no reference to this in his response. Having asked his questions, Sherwood went on to say with great blandness, “One of my reasons for asking these questions is that if a man has not told the truth about one matter, we, as people cannot be certain that he will tell the truth somewhere else.” This statement is posed in negative form, and the clause “if a man has not told the truth” tends to direct the reader toward the conclusion that he has not told the truth. As Ellen Schrecker has emphasized, one of the core beliefs about communists (bolstered by their own actions and by Lenin’s 1920 tract Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder) was that duplicity was “the essence of Communism.”37 Therefore, given the hostile quality of the questions themselves, Sherwood seems to be insinuating an unspecified connection between Hall and communism. All in all, Sherwood reveals very little of himself. Unlike Steiner, who directly states his beliefs, Sherwood exclusively employs insinuation as his weapon of choice, and he tries to veil this sufficiently to give the impression of himself as a scrupulously unbiased interrogator. So, what we have here is a deception aimed not merely at Hall but at the reading public, i.e., an attack from a position of pretended neutrality calculated to gain the trust of a reader.

A Closer Look, Part Two: The Ward Letters The other group of letters includes those written by Richard Ward, his critics, and his defenders. Ward’s letters stand out for being almost completely free of personal attack on his critics or on Hall; Ward’s animus is reserved for communists in the abstract. However, his letters bring out the warlike quality of this contest between political right and left more explicitly than any other letter writer. First, writing that “if Stevenson is in college to investigate red influences in education, there could be no better purpose in his being here,” Ward seeks to legitimize what normally (especially among the young) is considered an illegitimate activity, i.e., “ratting out” one’s fellows. Why is this okay? Because “it is well known that it is part of communist policy to corrupt the minds of idealistic and bewildered youth, and there is no better place for this than a college.” Ward writes, “I have not seen much evidence of red activities on this campus, if any,” but still “Let us Uconnites free our University of all reds, if it has any.” When he goes on to say the “only good communist is a dead communist,” there

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is no way around the unspoken connection between the two sentences: if a member of the university is found to be a communist, he or she should be killed. This theme of pitiless violence recurs several times in Ward’s ensuing two letters. In his letter of March 5, 1952, he claims that the Truman administration had “leaned over backwards seeking an understanding with the Russians” and had “turned the other cheek only too often, only finally to realize that only armed resistance can stop the Reds.” It is interesting to note that with this biblical reference we are given a veiled rationale for abrogating Christian values; the United States, Ward claims, had tried doing the Christian thing, i.e., turning the other cheek, but it hadn’t worked. In other words, there is an implicit suggestion that one should try doing what Jesus prescribed, but if it doesn’t change the behavior of the person striking your cheek, then you are justified in striking back and annihilating the S.O.B. In his last letter, of March 14, Ward is at his most explicit in his rationale for violence against communists: “it should be clear by now that the only language that communists understand is that which is blasted from the muzzle of a gun . . . We do not try to reach an understanding with the potato-bugs in our fields; we kill them.” Why? Because that “is sometimes the only way to solve the problem of dealing with creatures which are beyond the reach of reason” and because “it is their policy to enslave all of mankind.” Here we have the familiar tactic of dehumanization, a tactic that allows one to do virtually anything one likes to those who are the object of fear and dislike. Ralph Bohm’s response to Ward constitutes a straightforward personal attack. Its first paragraph is loaded with invective: I strongly doubt whether Richard Carleton Ward is one of those “idealistic youths” to whom he referred in his February 13 letter, but I feel quite certain that he is, without a doubt, “bewildered.” Mr. Ward’s letter struck me as one of the most inconsistent, confused, and over-all purely asinine concoctions of trivia that I have ever had the amusement to read.38 Bohm has two goals here: to undermine Ward’s credibility and to establish his own. He starts with an all-out ad hominem attack on Ward, mocking him with his (Ward’s) own words (“bewildered” and “idealistic youths”) and implying that one who could write such “inconsistent, confused, and . . . asinine . . . trivia” must surely be inconsistent, confused, asinine, and trivial himself and therefore unworthy of serious consideration by the reading audience. Bohm seeks to establish his own authority through implication as well; like Ward, he takes a tone of superiority. First, he mocks him, which means that he does not take Ward seriously. This, in turn, implies that he (Bohm) is in a position of sufficient intellectual authority to allow him to dismiss Ward. He seeks to reinforce this impression by informing the audience of his “amusement” at Ward’s letter.

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“Amusement” implies both superiority and detachment, thus indirectly seeking to establish the author as a superior and detached (and therefore impartial and trustworthy) person. A paragraph later Bohm renews his personal attack on Ward, ironically expressing his gladness at Ward’s willingness to “dedicate himself to ferreting out Reds at Uconn” and following that up by wondering if Ward “would be equally as anxious to change places with some loyal teacher who might have to work from day to day with the ever-ominous threat of losing his job simply because some self-appointed guardian of the democratic principles might develop a dislike for him.” Here the suggestion is that Ward is either heartless or grotesquely thoughtless; clearly he does not care about this anonymous, obscure, but loyal toiler (an image aroused by the phrase “day to day,” with its sense of ongoing work without significant highs or lows). What threatens this teacher is “losing his job simply because some self-appointed guardian of the democratic principles . . . might develop a dislike for him.” This too is a fairly densely packed phrase: the actor, the guardian of democratic principles, is “selfappointed.” This is plainly antidemocratic, meaning that the guardian in question is no defender of democracy at all but rather a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Being “self-appointed” means that the person is acting for selfish rather than public reasons, a motivation that makes him or her a danger to the group. This is reinforced by the suggestion that the teacher in question might lose his job “simply because” the self-appointed guardian “might develop a dislike for him.” Here, as in Gerich’s letter, is the specter of the witch-hunt—arbitrary, personalized power—a power employed for purely selfish, spiteful reasons over the innocent and their ability to gain a livelihood. The last paragraph of the letter is designed to finish off whatever is left of Ward. Reiterating Ward’s slogan “Russia must be destroyed,” Bohm asks, “What kind of warped thinking is this? I agree that communism must be wiped out, but to slaughter 200 million people and destroy over 8 million square miles of territory . . . seems something that deserves a little more thought—quite a little more than Mr. Ward, unfortunately, seems to have given it.” The question “what kind of warped thinking is this?” provides its own answer: it is the thinking of a dangerous lunatic, someone over the top, someone who is beyond the pale. Finally, there is Mendel Heilig’s response to Ward’s second letter. Heilig’s letter continues the personal attack on Ward, suggesting that Ward “is looking for some object to hate.” In other words, Ward must have a predisposition to hatred, this being an imputation that is designed to render Ward unattractive to the reader. Having said this, however, Heilig drops the theme of Ward’s personal motivation and does not return to it, at least not directly. He goes on to question Ward on substantive issues, doing so in a way that will bring Ward into further disrepute. For example, regarding communism in the Soviet Union, Heilig asks, “if Mr.

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Ward has so much faith in the Russian people as he professes, why doesn’t he desire to see the destruction [of communism] come from within, rather than urging the Americans into a horrendous war which would be suicidal for both antagonists?” This question implies that Ward might not have as much faith in the Russian people as he claims; in other words, he may not be completely honest. However, the chief emphasis in the sentence lies on Heilig’s attempt to awaken Ward and the readers to the consequences of Wardian thinking, i.e., the risk of a “horrendous” and “suicidal” war. Heilig goes on to accuse Ward of “becoming hysterical about our nation being overrun by the communists.” Here we have the evocation of a person who, though not “warped” as in Bohm’s portrait, is overwrought, out of control, and, therefore, whose judgment is not to be trusted. Heilig then intensifies his attack, characterizing Ward and his ilk as “individuals who lack faith, have bungalow brains for a mind, misjudge liberal opinion as communistically inspired.” I cannot pretend to know what “bungalow brains” might be, but it is clear that they are not good to have. More important here is the reiteration of Hall’s fear of those who would conflate liberals with communists; such a view is not attributed to malice, but rather to misjudgment. Nonetheless, there is a suggestion that it is not altogether safe to be a liberal. However, the explicit danger lies in the appeal of the conflation of liberals with communists to the “lesser thinking”; it “gets votes” (that is, it is a form of demagoguery and as such is a manifestation of irresponsibility), and in a democracy the getting of votes equals power, which equals the ability to act. The greatest peril, however, is not merely to liberals but to democracy itself. Heilig writes: I can only say the U.S. will be in danger only from those internal elements who are rightist chauvinists, and who would destroy the basic foundations of our democracy by the misuse of the word “communist” and crying “fire” at any nonconformist. History has shown that democracy has been destroyed by the rightists just as much as the leftists.39 This is explicit: the United States is endangered by “internal” elements and “rightist chauvinists,” i.e., the self-proclaimed superpatriots of the far right. The phrase “who would destroy” implies a willfulness to the activities of these “internal elements,” and the suggestion that their target is “any nonconformist” suggests that the rightist chauvinists are, in fact, aiming at the very same kind of “ant society” that Mrs. Stevenson so deplored. In fact, what we find here is an analysis embraced by liberals like historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that equates the extremes of right and left.40 One of the rhetorical virtues of such an analysis, as we shall see, is that it takes liberals from the politically suspect position of the “moderate left” and instead places them in what Schlesinger called the “Vital Center.”41

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Analysis These letters show political speech not as an attempt to express or get at truth but as battle, an effort to destroy an opponent, with the stakes being the core values of a society. This exchange constitutes a concrete demonstration of the degree to which in the decade following the end of World War II American political discourse between those to the left of the political center and those to the right of it in the decade following the end of World War II had become a battle to claim orthodox status for their divergent usages of key terms like “democracy” and “freedom.” As an earlier columnist for The Campus, Lou Gerson, wrote in 1948: whenever democracy moves to the left, the specter of communism rears its bloody head; whenever it is swung to the right, the alarm of fascism is sounded. Nobody seems to care what the above ideologies mean. Nobody cares to define them.42 The terms of that conflict posited the reading public not as an audience to be illuminated by truth (which, as Gerson perceived, would be wellserved by a general public commitment to a reasonably precise definition and understanding of key terms, even if, as W. B. Gallie and William E. Connolly have convincingly argued, agreement on the meaning of such “essentially contested” cluster concepts is unlikely or even impossible) but rather as an entity to be manipulated to one’s side, no matter how deceptive the rhetorical devices to be employed.43 And the underlying viciousness of this conflict manifests in all these letters. The seriousness of this is not diminished by the fact that this was rhetorical ruthlessness; the 1950s in particular were a time in which people’s lives and livelihoods might easily have been destroyed by unsubstantiated political charges. The logic driving this conflict was that of competition. Competition is central to the practices of both Euro-American-style democracy and capitalism. Moreover, competition is a practice that is held to embody core social values, operating as a concrete expression of freedom and of the individual’s real capacity to influence decisions about broad social actions. However, it is also a mechanism that accepts conflict as a given, as embedded in society. In fact, the entire point of an election is that it is a contest, a nonviolent way of mediating conflict. In other words, to turn Clausewitz on his head, democratic politics is actually war by other means: a resolution of disagreement that avoids the extreme and socially disruptive measure of people killing each other.44 The logic of competition empowers individuals or groups of individuals to try to defeat each other, depending only on a set of rules agreed upon by the members of society at large to act as a force that will prevent, not a particular opponent, but rather the principle of “opponency” from ever being completely annihilated (which would put an end to the notion of

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liberty and end the function of competition as a creative selective force).* So what comprises the consensual element in a capitalistic democracy is agreement on these principles underlying the rules that regulate the political/economic process. As long as they act within this set of rules that are designed to prevent them from achieving unopposed domination, both political competitors and economic competitors are empowered to try to destroy one another as completely as they may. I would like to emphasize here that the intrinsic logic of competition manifests in an effort toward the complete annihilation of the opponent, to attain a monopoly; if one political party could completely drive the other from all positions of power, it would; if one business could take all the business of all its competitors, it would. Only the rules of “the system” and the willingness of the political and judicial powers to enforce those rules limit any entity in its drive for monopoly. In a competitive political environment, the disposition of power and power structures themselves are inherently unstable (note the disappearance of the Federalist Party and later the Whig Party and its replacement by the Republican Party, and consider that instruments like the Constitution have provisions for amendment). Political parties, since their existence is predicated on the support of voters, must gain such stability as they possess in the same way that all purveyors of goods must, i.e., by some combination of marketing political goods that already appeal to their prospective customers along with shaping the thinking of voters to persuade them that they desire the goods being hawked. This means that parties must align themselves with a set of core concepts that will appeal to a critical mass of voters. These concepts, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, are reinforced and enforced through the reproduction at the grassroots (in this case, students) level of rhetorical strategies employed at the top (professional politicians). This process of active reproduction at all levels establishes a continuity between elite groups and the grassroots, creating the measure of social control required to act effectively in mass societies. It becomes the embodiment of an approach to politics that turns ideological concepts into the basis for decisions as diverse as which candidate one votes for, which people one socializes with, which product one purchases, which person one hires, which person one fires. Ideology, then, is central to socio-political dominance in a competitive system inasmuch as a key tactic employed by political and economic leaders is to seek to win voters and consumers to their side by controlling

* It is the triumph of this principle that Richard Hofstadter celebrates in The Idea of a Party System, pointing to the presidential election of 1800 as a decisive moment in the history of the early Republic, a moment when power was transferred from one party to another without violent resistance by the losers. See Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), chap. 4.

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the definition of socially central concepts. While political contests in a democracy do not necessarily always have an ideological component, when they do, the ideological struggle generally constitutes an effort to establish one’s own views as orthodox, that is, a set of concepts whose broad normative acceptance automatically establishes challengers of those concepts as “other.” This effort to establish an orthodoxy manifests in an effort to discredit opponents utterly, casting them out as heterodox. This is at least a rough description of the tactics in the ideological conflicts between liberals and conservatives in 20th century American politics. The arena for this struggle can be conceived as a linguistic and conceptual field of battle, a landscape with key strategic points and key words like “freedom” or “democracy” that are the basis of consent. Dominance over those points is achieved through establishing one’s own definition of those words as standard, which allows one to define the terms of the political debate, set social agendas, and lay the ground for policies (e.g., tax relief for specific social groups or welfare policies) and for public acceptance and support for those policies. Also, dominance is achieved through success in excluding rival possibilities as unacceptable. Maximum success—hegemony—is achieved when these other definitions are branded as so unacceptable that they are not even open to discussion. Nonetheless, the conditions of competition itself plus the inevitable development of new social and physical conditions ensure that any predominance is inherently unstable. While this predominance can be maintained, its maintenance will require an ongoing effort to dominate those areas that represent points of broad social agreement. The ensuing argument among the aspirants to power, then, represents not merely an airing of views, but rather an attempt to act upon the world, to dominate—in effect, to establish a political monopoly—through the establishment of a hegemonic ideology. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci enunciated the concept of hegemony in response to the (in his view) mistaken economic determinism (economism) of “scientific” Marxists and also as an explanation of an anomaly that the mechanistic approach of economism could not explain, i.e., the fact that with surprising frequency members of subordinate classes in modern capitalist societies seem to embrace the very system that, in the view of Marxists, exploits them.45 This paradox is most pointedly expressed by the fact that while the forms of parliamentary democracy seem to give those who are deemed to be the exploited majority the legal means to expropriate the property of the exploiters and to take over control of the means of production, the industrial and agrarian workers of advanced capitalist countries have failed to use that power and have usually explicitly rejected those who urged them to use it. While all Marxists have understood capitalist systems to have coercive properties, Gramsci perceived that along with domination there was a crucial consensual element in these systems that required understanding and explanation; in

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fact, he concluded that “[c]onsensus over values and beliefs is the major source of cohesion in bourgeois society.”46 Given the consensual nature of hegemony, important questions arise; i.e., what is the object of consent, why is it an object of consent, what is the nature of consent, how is this consent obtained, and how is it maintained? Departing from a strict adherence to Gramsci, I am suggesting that the object of consent is twofold. Claus Offe argues with some reason that “the ideal state of affairs” in a market economy is one in which “every citizen can take care of all of his or her needs through participation in market properties,” and, in accordance with this, the foundation and legitimating doctrine of capitalist society is “the abstract principle of making a subject of permanent market exchange relationships out of every citizen.” Offe further emphasizes that this principle “does more to keep state policies in tune with the class interests of the agents of accumulation than any supposed ‘conspiracy’ between ‘overlapping directorates’ of state and industry could possibly achieve”; therefore, a capitalist state has legitimacy (i.e., consent) to the extent that it achieves “full employment of all units of value under the exploitative conditions of the capitalist mode of production.”47 In other words, to the extent that the state maintains the conditions that allow for full employment of both labor and capital, it will be accepted as legitimate by its citizens. However, the full employment of all units of value is not itself legitimacy, but rather a contributory condition. Legitimacy is a mental phenomenon, the acceptance of a state by a critical mass of its citizens; hence, there is an important noneconomic dimension to legitimacy that Offe ignores. Gramsci fills this gap, suggesting that the object of consent is a set of values and beliefs instilled in the members of a society by the organs of civil society, that is, non-state institutions such as families, schools, churches, etc. These values arise from the intellectual and moral leadership exercised by the dominant elements of society. As Joseph Femia puts it, “in modern times, at least, the dominant class must establish its own moral, political and cultural values as conventional norms of practical behaviour.”48 Gramsci, then, believes that social control “takes two basic forms: besides influencing behaviour and choice externally, through rewards and punishments, it also affects them internally, by moulding personal convictions into a replica of prevailing norms.”49 The idea is that “within a stable social order, there must be a substratum of agreement so powerful that it can counteract the division and disruptive forces arising from conflicting interests.” This consensus, expressed through values, norms, perceptions, and beliefs, must embrace “the allocation of scarce goods, the permissible range of disagreement, and the institutions through which decisions about such allocations are made.”50 In short, “those who are consenting must somehow be truly convinced that the interests of the dominant group stands for a proper social order in which all men are justly looked after.”51 Therefore, as Christine Buci-Glucksmann points

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out, “In the strict sense, the hegemony of a class is not imposed: it is conquered through a specific intellectual and moral dimension through a politics of alliance which must open up a national perspective to the whole of society. . . . The hegemonic class goes beyond any bourgeois economistic position, any narrow corporatist vision of its role. It ‘universalises’ its own interests and ensures that ‘they can and must become the interests of the other subordinate groups.’”52 One critical effect of this process and the propagation of the values contained in hegemonic ideology is to disguise areas of class conflict; according to Femia, “Gramsci stresses that class conflict is not just channeled by generally accepted norms: it is effectively neutralized. To his mind, the present antagonistic social reality can be upheld only if the antagonisms contained in it are hidden from view.”53 Further, “if abstractions like ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ are identified with existing institutions, this will present a barrier to the diffusion of alternative images of society. So, all things considered, while the workers may be dissatisfied . . . they are unable even to locate the source of their discontent, still less remedy it.”54 The means by which hegemony is gained and maintained is through the propagation of a system of beliefs and values, in other words, through an ideology. A successfully propagated hegemonic ideology is a commonly held, internalized worldview that structures the everyday thoughts, responses, perceptions, and relationships of the members of a given society. In this way, the ideology becomes “the ‘common sense’ of the whole of society, the ‘structure of feeling’ in which it lives.”55 It is so pervasive that it organizes and directs the thoughts and actions of people in ways they hardly notice. As we have seen, Gramsci had already repudiated much of Marxian determinism, but his analysis retained an essentialist view of social classes as fixed entities. In his study of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s interpretations of hegemony, Jacob Torfing describes their stripping away of these remnants of essentialist thought, redefining hegemony as “the expansion of a discourse or set of discourses, into a dominant horizon of social orientation and action by means of articulating unfixed elements into partially fixed moments in a context crisscrossed by antagonistic forces.”56 The phrase “discourse or set of discourses” emphasizes that hegemony is achieved through the control of concepts clothed in language. The “expansion” of this into a “dominant horizon of social orientation” suggests that a set of concepts attached to a given social interest or set of social interests—in other words, an ideology—becomes accepted or embraced widely enough to create a general tendency for it to become an orthodox basis of belief and action in a given society. How does it do this? By taking bits and pieces of specific conditions and the thoughts and feelings people have about those conditions, removing them from their contexts, and generalizing them. The result is a “construction of a predominant discursive formation”57 that orients collective and individual

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social action and the allocation of social resources in certain directions. However, the “context crisscrossed by antagonistic forces” is not resolved into a harmonious discursive field; as mentioned earlier, metaphorically it can be conceived as a linguistic and conceptual field of battle, a landscape with key strategic points that are the object of contention. Dominance over those points allows one to define the terms of the political debate, set social agendas, and lay the ground for policies (e.g., pro-labor or anti-labor, pro-business or anti-business) and for public support for and acceptance and enforcement of those policies. As Torfing has written, “Hegemonic articulation ultimately involves some element of force and repression. It involves the negation of identity in the double sense of the negation of alternative meanings and options and the negation of those people who identify themselves with these meanings and options [emphasis added].”58 This seems a reasonable description of the process we have seen at work in the letters analyzed earlier. The question then arises whether and how liberal democracy, with its pluralistic values, can accommodate this process of negation. Carl Schmitt had argued that it could not since, as Torfing explains, the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. According to Schmitt an enemy is someone who “must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed.” From this it follows that there can be no enemies and thus no politics, within a liberal democracy that clearly does not accept the destruction of oppositional forces.59 Torfing seeks to salvage liberal democracy by invoking the distinction made by Chantal Mouffe between “enemies” whom we attempt to annihilate and “adversaries” whose “existence is legitimate and must be tolerated.”60 He adduces a further refinement made by Murray Edelman, who made a distinction between “unacceptable” and “acceptable” opponents, the difference between the two being that adversaries follow the rules of the game while enemies do not.61 What is missed here, however, and what these letters demonstrate is the fact that when it comes to ideological differences, Schmitt is correct: it is, in fact, the goal of the players to establish an ideological monopoly through a process of defining their opponents as outside the group, in the present instance as “un-American.” This may seem to be a curious assertion concerning a political system whose very essence is the negotiation of compromises to allow social action; however, the Western tradition of toleration was hammered out in the process of people embracing incompatible religious and political ideologies, trying without success to destroy each other in the most literal way. The fact that westerners usually no longer seek to kill their political opponents (their compatriots, that is) and instead resort to compromise does not mean that they want to compromise. In fact, we all know that usually people

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do not want to compromise. They do it because they must. Compromise does not inherently imply the willingness to let one’s opponents exist but rather the necessity to let them exist. Finally, we see that in the 1950s this process of destruction, though its style and rhetoric may originate at the level of the political elite, was perpetrated at all levels of society. Sherwood and Steiner mimicked the rhetorical style of the more vigorous red-hunters like Richard Arens, who, as counsel for the HUAC, asked a member of the Southern California Peace Crusade, “kindly tell us, while you are under oath now, and in the aura of patriotism which you have surrounded yourself [with] in your opening statement, whether or not you betrayed your country by being executive secretary of this organization designed to subvert the security of this great nation.”62 Sherwood and Steiner’s purpose was not to discuss issues and enlighten an audience but rather to destroy their target through charges or insinuations of disloyalty; their opponents riposted with their own insinuations, their own charges. Anticommunism has been a most potent element in the establishment of hegemonic ideology in the United States since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Its early emergence as a means of controlling the country’s workforce is demonstrated by the fact that when steelworkers struck in 1919, demanding the 8-hour day, a 48-hour week, and the abolition of 24-hour shifts, [m]anagement argued that the steel workers were well paid—that they went on strike only because they wanted a holiday—and that the strike leaders were nothing but Reds. Skillfully aligning his side with “Americanism,” a very popular if nebulous concept the first year after the war, Elbert H. Gary, chairman of the board of United States Steel, charged that the strikers wanted “the closed shop, Soviets, and the forcible distribution of property.”63 And so we must revisit the issue of private property, this time in its connection to “Americanism.” In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels write that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Here, in the attack on private property, is the bald threat represented by communism; however, to understand the American response to this properly, we must consider the significance of property in the Anglo-American tradition. To an American, property stands for both control over one’s own life and self-expression and also security from the power of others. It represents a barrier of rights that protect the individual’s autonomy from the impingements of the collective. Property also represents a realm of potential conflict between the individual and the collective since on the one hand it is the sphere in which the individual can act freely while on the other hand it requires the power of the collective for its definition and defense. A central purpose of law

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in American society is to protect property without interfering with the exercise of the rights associated with it. Although the economic system, which has made private property its foundation—capitalism—and the political system of democracy are formally two distinct systems, historically they are intimately linked, both structurally and psychically. From the Magna Carta on, the history of the spread of individual personal and political rights—the history of the shift of sovereignty from an individual monarch to that mysterious body known as “the people”—has been inextricable from the protection of private property from predatory monarchs and others with an insufficiently fine sense of the distinction between mine and thine.64 Thus, as we’ve already mentioned, Jennifer Nedelsky has pointed out in Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy that in the Anglo-American tradition property has taken on a role as the historic symbol of individual autonomy. In the aftermath of the American Revolution the attention of lawmakers shifted from the tyranny of elites to a new and ominous specter: the possible tyranny of the unpropertied majority. Important American statesmen like James Madison realized that “only a minority . . . can be interested in preserving the rights of property” and that the people “were as capable of despotism as any prince.”65 Madison, believing the “first object” of government to be the “protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property,” took care that the fundamental document of the new nation, the Constitution, was crafted in such a way as to accomplish this end.66 When we understand that in the United States, the concept of property has historically been loaded with this freight of extra-economic meaning, we can also understand why it is that an economic system that attacks property also will be seen to attack autonomy and individual rights at all levels. That American communists unabashedly identified themselves with the Soviet Union and that the Soviet state was in fact an enemy of individual rights as well as being an enemy of private property were facts that fed the suspicions of a public historically wary of vesting political power in collective forms. If the discourse of American politics does, as posited earlier, represent a battle for control of the meaning of political language, for key words such as “freedom,” the war is over who gets to set the meaning of the word “American.” Simply the name of that potent investigating committee, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, speaks volumes. To be “un-American” is not simply to be, by some unfortunate but unavoidable accident of birth, British or Chinese or, worse yet, French, but is to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a US citizen who is the carrier of a belief system that will destroy everything that being American stands for, freedom most of all. Or at least it seems that that is what the quarrel is about; however, I am about to argue that much more than control over ideas,

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the McCarthyist/conservative Republican tactic was focused on group identity politics that operate at a more visceral level, that is, the ability to define who is in the group (“American”) and who is not and is therefore an enemy. In his great work Suicide, the sociologist Émile Durkheim’s central finding was that social integration, i.e., an individual’s strong ties to a network of human beings, is an innate human need. More recently, this perception has been refined by Jack P. Gibbs and Walter T. Martin, who meld Durkheim’s finding with Max Weber’s insights in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization to arrive at the hypothesis that the stability and durability of the social relationships through which social integration is achieved derive from individuals’ conformity to the socially sanctioned demands and expectations of others.67 This being so, one may infer that all other circumstances being equal, this powerful emotional need for social integration and the dependency of this integration on one’s conformity to a set of social norms will contribute to a general human tendency to favor the social status quo when that status quo represents a set of stable social relationships. This inference does not constitute an assertion that this human propensity to social integration decisively commits human societies to the ideology called conservatism; the status quo could be a conservative or liberal or socialist social arrangement. I am, however, suggesting that to the extent that people are integrated into a set of relationships—even relationships that may tend to oppress them—they will act under the restraining influence of a predisposition to preserve what they have, not only materially but also socially, rather than embarking on experimental and uncertain courses that might endanger the stability not only of their possessions but also of their relationships and thereby threaten them with the possibility of isolation. However, in The Division of Labor in Society Durkheim also showed that there are two fundamental forms of social cohesion, which he called “mechanical solidarity” (or “solidarity by similarities”) and “organic solidarity”: the question follows whether both are equally well suited to meet this emotional need of social integration. In Durkheim’s estimation the distinguishing mark of mechanical solidarity (which he connected to tribal and pre-industrial societies and which, in Weberian terms, might be tied to traditional societies) is a “collective or common consciousness” that is “diffused over society as a whole.”68 Organic solidarity, on the other hand, he connected to the development of the division of labor in industrial societies. Through the development of specialization, organizational links develop between individuals that are structural rather than psychic; individuals’ activities become more tightly bound into the social whole, while their individual consciousnesses are more free to develop in their own ways. It seemed to Durkheim that mechanical solidarity was waning as a basis for human association; from the standpoint of the

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1890s it seemed evident to him that “social solidarity is tending to become exclusively organic,” i.e., based on the division of labor.69 French anthropologist Louis Dumont has picked up Durkheim’s themes, linking Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity with Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft respectively. Dumont maintains that these forms (which he renames “holism” and “individualism”) are not successive but necessarily coexist within modern societies, concluding “not only that individualism is unable to replace holism wholesale and rule everywhere in society, but that in actual fact it was never able to function without an unperceived contribution of holism to its life. A first reason for this is that it developed in societies which did not cease to live as they had hitherto. Individualism was an ideological outgrowth of them which in a first stage drew sustenance from them.”70 Yet, he maintains, “[t]hese two views of man and society, even though in a given society they are present empirically at different levels, are directly incompatible,”71 for while individualism is typified by the “primacy of the relations of men to things,” by the “segregation of values from facts and ideas,” and by the “distribution of knowledge into independent, homologous, and homogeneous planes or disciplines,” holism privileges the relations of social members to each other over the relationship of individuals to things, identifies ideas and facts with values, and sees knowledge as indivisible from society itself.72 Dumont further points out that holism also implies sociocentrism because it postulates social relationships as inherent values rather than as byproducts of structural ties and interdependencies. Under these circumstances a society comes to see itself as an organic entity and therefore “rejects—or inferiorizes—alien cultures, the cultures that are other than one’s own.”73 Mechanical solidarity, then, is a grouping that stresses being, sameness, and the personal inasmuch as it is predicated on the presumption of a shared essence, while organic solidarity is impersonal inasmuch as it stresses activity, building on differentiation and interdependence of functions. Where bonds on the basis of the person are relatively weak, the structural bonds must necessarily be strong if a society is to cohere; in other words, societies strongly marked by individualism must of necessity be held together by the structural interdependence that is intrinsic to the division of labor; also, since under these conditions the psychic connection between individuals is weak, in acting, they will be most usually and powerfully motivated by the drive for self-gratification. However, since the structural principle of integration associated with the division of labor is utterly impersonal, it cannot provide the emotional sense of belonging that people seem to require. Durkheim celebrates the individuation that results from the division of labor, writing that “to be a person means to be an autonomous source of action. Thus man only attains this state to the degree that there is something within him that is his and his alone, that makes him an individual, whereby he is more than the mere embodiment

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of the generic type of his race and group.”74 However, this individuation is only possible through a process of separation that inevitably entails some degree of isolation of individuals from the group. With isolation comes self-awareness but also loneliness and psychic dis-integration. Durkheim was quite conscious of the anomic possibilities inherent in increasing specialization, painting a picture of “the individual, bent low over his task,” isolated in his own special activity, a lonely person who “will no longer be aware of the collaborators who work at his side on the same task, he has even no longer any idea at all of what that common task consists.”75 To Durkheim, however, this development was not one inevitably tied to the nature of the division of labor but rather was an “exceptional and abnormal” circumstance whose antidote was that “the individual should not be too closely shut up in [his special function] but should keep in constant contact with neighbouring functions, becoming aware of their needs and the changes that take place in them.” Thus, the worker would feel “that he is of some use,” that his “actions have a goal beyond themselves.”76 Durkheim became aware of the inadequacy of his own cure for social anomie, for in his preface to the second edition of The Division of Labor he proposed the formation of professional corporations whose purpose would be to provide a “moral force capable of curbing individual egoism, nurturing among workers a more envigorated feeling of their common solidarity, and preventing the law of the strongest from being applied too brutally in industrial and commercial relationships.”77 These bodies would be based on common professions and/or interests and might in time “become the foundation . . . of our political organisation.” On an even grander scale society could become “a vast system of national corporations.”78 He does not seem to have considered, however, that perhaps only the holistic principle associated with mechanical solidarity could provide the sense of emotional integration humans seem to require. Furthermore, Durkheim did not see that with the emergence of individualism comes not only a sense of separateness and incipient alienation, but also the possibility of individual desires whose satisfaction might require the exploitation of one’s fellow humans for one’s own benefit. He never saw that what drove the ever more finely articulated division of labor was not some abstract devotion to the betterment of humanity but rather its connection to a system of private ownership based on the profit motive and the ethos of acquisition. He never acknowledged the centrality of the profit motive to the workings of capitalist society, and, further, did not see the divisiveness inherent to this form of economic organization, with capitalist ranged against capitalist, individual workers doomed to compete against each other for scarce jobs, workers in conflict with owners, and finally workers alienated from their own activity and the fruits of their labor.79

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The two basic categories we seem to be haunted by are “same”—which connects—and “different”—which separates. However, “same” and “different” only exist by virtue of each other, which brings us to the proposition that at all times all humans in all societies operate to a greater or lesser extent under the tension of the two starkly irreconcilable and yet utterly inseparable principles of identity and difference, self and other, subject and object. Even the principle of the division of labor is held together by sameness, though not sameness of person but sameness of the end goal, the product; hence, as Dumont notes, the primacy of the individual’s relationship to the thing as opposed to other people. Conversely, holistic societies still must emphasize differences; the sexes and age groups each tend to be assigned different functions. From an emotional viewpoint, what is self is safe, while what is other is at first encounter a matter of uncertainty: will it hurt me? Nourish me? Give me pleasure? Or pain? The general process people follow is, having encountered the other, to then attempt to resolve its status relative to oneself; having done so, it is classified as either desirable, undesirable, or a matter of indifference. If it is desirable, we try to appropriate it, which incorporates it into our sense of self. If it is undesirable (which includes the threatening as well as the merely distasteful), we seek to repel it and cease our association with it. If it is neither, we ignore it. Frequently our response to objects of experience is more complex; we find some parts desirable, others undesirable, and yet others to be neutral. In that case, we tend to try to appropriate those parts that are desirable, repel those that are undesirable, and ignore the neutral. We even exist in this same subject/object relationship with ourselves, assessing our various physical and mental features and states as desirable, undesirable, and neutral. One might challenge the assertion that we seek to appropriate the desirable on the grounds that it is possible for a person simply to appreciate something without going so far as to seek to devour and digest it. Suppose, for example, I were to see a beautiful flower in a meadow; I might well enjoy it in its natural setting without having any desire to cut it and take it home or without wishing to purchase the meadow so that the flower might be mine, mightn’t I? But a closer look suggests that appreciation is only a less gross form of appropriation. We have a self—the observer—and the other—the flower in its setting. What is the relationship between the two? The observer witnesses the flower through the medium of sight; light strikes his or her eye, conveying an image. At this stage an assessment takes place; the object of experience is pleasing (desirable), ugly (undesirable), or neutral. In response to this assessment, we wish to either have more of the experience (appropriate it) or disconnect from it (reject it), or we simply don’t notice it (ignore it). This brings us to the main point, which is that though we usually do not realize it, it is not objects we desire but the experiences associated with them. The possession of the object is only important insofar as it will allow us to

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have more of the experience. If we are content to experience the flower without picking it, it is because we are sufficiently subtle to direct our desire toward our subjective experience of beauty rather than its object. Nonetheless, we seek to devour that experience; we linger at the fence, taking in the flower, eating our experience until necessity, satiation, or distraction takes us away. The object, then, is only important as the instigator of the experience, that which, because of our positive assessment, can cause the experience to continue. At the point that we have successfully appropriated it, however, it becomes self and can no longer be an object of desire, because, by definition, it is no longer an object but has become part of the subject. For example, once we have eaten an appetizing morsel of food, it is no longer an object of desire but rather has become part of ourselves. We can no longer wish to eat that morsel, though we might desire another one. In short, it is only insofar as the other can successfully resist being appropriated that it can remain an object of desire, an object of experience that in turn confirms that we exist. Even love depends on the otherness of our lover; we may, for a brief space of time, be able to have the experience that they are one with us, yet our sense of satisfaction betrays the fact that they are still other; otherwise we would be like a tongue with nothing to taste. So, we are in the further dilemma of constantly wanting to be satisfied and just as constantly not wanting to be satisfied, wanting to be full and wanting to be hungry so that we may taste some more. We define ourselves by the other, which means that we are simultaneously affirmed by it and imprisoned by it. If we break out of our boundaries, it is only to encounter first the simultaneous freedom and panic of not knowing who we are and then new boundaries (i.e., definition and imprisonment) beyond the old ones. Going still deeper, we can see that we are always in a dual relationship with our own experience, that it too is an “other,” classified as desirable, undesirable, and neutral. Perhaps this is not necessary; perhaps we could actually experience at-oneness with our experience, but in that case, we would not have the luxury of sitting back in our comfortable chairs and saying, “What a good meal that was!” We would be too close to ourselves to turn our experiences into objects of experience because every moment we would be our experience rather than looking at it. In short, we are hopelessly caught in a paradox: even though we always attempt to resolve the status of the other by appropriation into self or abolishment, we depend on the other to establish self, our own status as a real, existent self. We cannot know how clever we are unless there are those who are stupid; we cannot appreciate our own beauty unless there are those who are ugly; we cannot know how good we are unless there are those who are bad; and we cannot know how right we are unless there are others who are wrong (bless their misguided souls!). Without the other, we would be completely, unacceptably indeterminate. For this reason, we are simultaneously

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comfortable and uncomfortable with unequal status relationships such as that between parent and child. The child simultaneously and incompatibly wants the security that comes from feeling that someone else is in control and the freedom of autonomy. Identity of any kind, then, insofar as such a thing can be said to exist at all, is at best a tenuous and vulnerable phenomenon, teetering precariously in a perpetual balancing act between self and other. Socially, this has enormous ramifications. By extension, this logic of identification and differentiation suggests that people can associate on the basis of two principles: (1) what could be called an extended sense of self, based on identity or sameness, and (2) individual self-interest, based on principles of difference and separation. A group formed on the basis of the shared self-interests of individuals relies on principles of individualism and is essentially opportunistic, and its psychic bonds are fragile since a shift in real or perceived interests will easily dissolve such alliances. Perhaps the purest example is a group of shareholders in a company; they will buy into or sell out of the group in keeping with their perceived interests and without any qualms about issues of loyalty. On the other hand, a shared group identity, associated with holism, requires the surrender of at least some degree of individualism as one subsumes one’s individual good in that of a group to which one feels one belongs and which can seem—as a larger self—more important than one’s smaller individual self. Within the context of American culture, ethnicity is one example of this kind of tie; one tends to feel that “Irishness” or “Jewishness” is a part of one’s identity that cannot be shed even should one desire to do so. If my group is attacked, I feel that I am attacked even though I may be far away at the time and even though the attack may have little effect on the circumstances of my life. Once established, the bonds of shared identity are more durable than those of self-interest since they are less vulnerable to shifting circumstances; such a group gains further strength from the fact that its members are often willing to sacrifice self for the real or perceived good of the whole—an action that makes no sense if the tie is merely one of self-interest. Now we can return to the proposition that the holistic principle and the need for social integration associated with it carry within them an intrinsic resistance to change (and hence are most often associated with conservatism) since they tend toward the establishment and preservation of identity. The establishment of identity altogether depends on identification with stable, predictable features; one cannot build an identity based on flux since such an identity is actually no identity at all. Within that, there are two kinds of things that can, at least in people’s imaginings, remain steady: objects (including individuals and groups as objects or things) and processes. In terms of process as a source of identity, one would be referring to an identification with certain stable underlying principles of

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change that are considered to be “good.” Change undermines the stability of the group and the stability of relationships within a group; thus, by disrupting the web of relationships that constitutes identity, it threatens identity and the sense of belonging. This also explains the frequent ferocity of the responses of those most deeply invested in cultural holism to diversity; their very existence as a self is endangered by a growing tide of otherness. The challenge then becomes either to repel the other or to redefine it as self. Often, the relationship is more complex, with elements of repulsion and desirability intermixed; it is then that we see the development of social forms such as paternalism that mix domination of the other with identification with it. It also seems to be possible for individuals to split up their sense of holism and individualism according to spheres of activity; the system of thought associated with capitalism, for example, postulates a separation of the distinct spheres of economic and social activity, with political activity mediating between the two. In American society it seems that those identified with the political right emphasize differentiation and individualism in the economic sphere—reflected in the justification of widely disparate rewards for different economic activities and hostility to at least some collective economic forms (such as labor unions)—while favoring the sameness associated with holism (exemplified by the insistence on allegedly universal religious values) in the cultural/social sphere. The political left, on the other hand, generally seeks to reward different economic activities more equally, indicating a more even evaluation of their social worth, while privileging diversity of thought and belief patterns in the cultural/ social realm. The core cultural institution most usually associated with the perpetuation of cultural holism, and the one most anxiously defended by the champions of cultural holism, is the family. Feminists have sensitized us to the fact that the family itself is the locus of intense and fundamental power relationships, and certainly there is a heavy element of the defense of privilege that has led men to assert that women’s primary duty is to the home; however, if we stop our analysis there, we will not understand the reason many women concurred with this dictum, and we will not understand the full force of the dictum itself. Female independence poses a threat not only to male status but also to the existence of the sense of extended self and social integration that for many men and women alike is embodied in traditional family arrangements. Until recently in certain circles women who pursued an individualistic course not only were considered to be unfaithful to their families; they were actually “enemies of society.”80 As Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Samuel Saloman explained in the 1920s, “If society is to live . . . women must ‘cheerfully’ accept their familial duties.”81 Indeed, Nancy MacLean tells us, Klan members held that “the hierarchical family was the basis and guarantor of ordered society”82 and “the Klan expected family members, especially women and

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children, to subordinate their individual aspirations to the needs of the corporate unit.”83 More contemporaneously, we find concerns about the integrity of the holistic family in the face of the impersonal world of market forces at the heart of the current conflict over abortion rights. In Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood Kristin Luker, looking at the social attitudes of present-day California female abortion activists (both pro and against), found that beliefs concerning abortion tended consistently to accompany a whole set of other, related beliefs that linked these women to either holistic or individualistic values. On the whole, Luker found pro-life women to be those who “valued family roles very highly,” those who married “because their values suggested that this would be the most satisfying life open to them,” while pro-choice women “postponed (or avoided) marriage and family roles because they chose to acquire the skills they needed to be successful in the larger world, having concluded that the role of wife and mother was too limited for them.”84 Also, pro-lifers tended to accept the notion of separate spheres for the sexes, holding that within their own sphere women were as important as men, while pro-choice women were likely to be committed to full equality for women in the workplace as well as the home. Finally, pro-life women tended to consider religion to be “one of the most important aspects of her life,” while pro-choicers were not generally intensely religious.85 Part of the threat of abortion, then, is that by saying that it is permissible to dispose of a fetus because it is inconvenient or because one cannot afford another child, abortion “seems to support the value of economic considerations over moral ones.” Even more significantly, “[f]or pro-life people, a world view that puts the economic before the noneconomic hopelessly confuses two different kinds of worlds. For them, the private world of family as traditionally experienced is the one place in human society where none of us has a price tag.”86 However, family ties, though the building blocks of holism in society, are not a sufficient foundation for the functioning of an industrial society (even though during the 1920s the practitioners of welfare capitalism sought to exploit this role of the family as the basic holistic unit in society when they tried to project the image of their companies as “The Happy Family”).87 A society whose economy is structured on the principle of the division of labor cannot function on the basis of the clan. The requirements of capital and especially labor markets set capital and people into perpetual motion, militating against the kind of stability associated with societies structured on the principle of family. Historically, leaders of the larger society have attempted to overcome this problem by an appeal to nationalism, an ideological construct that is essentially holistic. The claim of nationalism is that somehow we all constitute an extended self because we are all Americans, or French, or Russians, etc. Indeed, some spirit of self-sacrifice deriving from cultural

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holism is essential to the survival of any nation, or else who would be willing to die for their country in time of war? However, the ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity of a nation like the United States considerably compromises the holistic principle that constitutes the binding force of nationalism inasmuch as the differences among us are, or seem to be, so glaring. Furthermore, capitalism itself is antithetical to holism; as Karl Polanyi showed in The Great Transformation, the creation of the free labor market necessary to the capitalist system entails the dissociation of human beings from their physical and social environments so that they can act as units of labor that can be freely moved wherever the economy demands. Under such alienating conditions what is to be the basis of a holistic national spirit? The history of the United States makes it abundantly clear that there is no national consensus on what “being American” means. Beyond the biological family, those most invested in noneconomic holism have generally sought to create ties that were family-like with people who might be considered family-like. For many, perhaps most, “old-stock” Americans, the qualifications of a “real” American have been whiteness (race), Protestantism (religion), and northern European extraction (race again), and as Alan Dawley points out, “the myth of the true American fed on status panic wherever old-stock Americans were found in the social scale,”88 “Yankee Protestants of old wealth and lineage” who “reached out to other old-stock Americans, reasserted the principles that had once made them great, and called upon the state to enforce them.” In so doing, they “turned away from the rational republic and, instead, dredged up from the dark side of the American myth the hierarchical principles of the biological republic—white supremacy, Anglo-Saxon nativism, ‘America for the Americans.’”89 Those who belonged to this club and were economically comfortable were likely to practice relatively genteel forms of discrimination against outsiders: exclusion from social clubs, limiting admissions of minority members to colleges and universities, restricting their rise in the professions, etc. Those lower in the socio-economic scale, those who had a little but not much, were susceptible to the appeal of the “biological republic” as a way of shoring up their tenuous economic position and social status. As Nancy MacLean shows in Behind the Mask of Chivalry, her study of the second Ku Klux Klan, those who were white and Protestant but were economically vulnerable often clung all the more tightly to the primacy of their racial and religious identity and had a more violent rage against those who by their “otherness” endangered the integrity of the (mythical) holistic society. In both cases, the appeal for social cohesion was made on the basis of shared physical attributes and shared belief systems, i.e., sameness in the noneconomic sphere. Through the ideological wars for political hegemony, collectivist economic action from below has, for the most part, been rejected as “alien”

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by those elements in American society likely to benefit from it. However, these groups are often those most attuned to cultural holism, and among the most important elements ranged against communism and other forms of economic collectivism have been citizens’ organizations such as the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as a variety of other groups, sometimes representative of elites like the Daughters of the American Revolution, which invariably portrayed their efforts as a struggle to preserve traditional American values of individualism, self-sufficiency, and freedom. Since these groups consistently invoked what they themselves understood to be traditional values against the encroachments of a soulless, collectivist modernity, it is tempting and, in fact, usual to see this exclusively as an encounter of the past with the present. There is a common sense logic and unquestionably much truth in the idea that those who have reason to fear change would cling to patterns of the past, the traditional, as representing the conditions that had provided them with their present (endangered) prosperity. However, there are certain anomalies that must be examined before we accept this as a sufficient explanation for such backward-looking phenomena as nativism or the Ku Klux Klan. For one thing, the most vociferous exponents of “traditional” values have often been those industrialists who were most vigorously bringing the forms of modernity into being by destroying—often consciously—the forms of traditional life. Conversely, the rebirth of one of the most reactionary of the citizens’ organizations—the Klan—had enormous success in the 1920s largely because of the modern marketing techniques of a pair of people—Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke—who were involved in the very modern occupation of salesmanship. Finally, that much-revered past had not been uniformly kind to the ancestors of many of the people who most wanted to preserve it; for example, in her discussion of the Athens, Georgia, Ku Klux Klan, Nancy MacLean points out that the parents of many Klan members were often illiterate, povertystricken mill-workers, and “[s]uch success as Klan proprietors and whitecollar workers had . . . was often recently acquired.”90 Furthermore, few of the men in MacLean’s sample—only 18 out of 364—were farmers, the traditional occupation of Southerners; most of them had achieved their modest prosperity through a peripheral connection with the market economy that was the engine of modernity. So why this sentimentalism about a past that had so often been difficult and oppressive to their fathers and mothers or grandfathers and grandmothers? Finally, the nature of the relationship between the “traditional” and the “modern” is further brought into question by the widespread persistence of “traditional” attitudes into the present period, a period that supposedly has gone beyond modernity into “post-modernity.” The vigorous continuation of the abortion debate, along with others such as “creationism” versus evolution, into the present time supports the contention that the persistence of this opposition between “traditional” and “modern” or

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“post-modern” and whatever comes next cannot be accounted for simply in temporal terms of old versus new. However, the appeal to the past by people seeking to maintain a sense of social integration can be explained by their wanting to maintain the remnants of existing relationships through an appeal to holistic values embodied in traditional practices against the pressures of individualistic values embodied in impersonal market forces. In his essay “The Conservative” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously postulated “two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation,” representing “the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason.”91 In the 20th and 21st centuries, liberals have claimed the position of the “party of hope” and, with Emerson, consigned conservatives to the role of the “party of memory.” Corresponding to this distinction, there are, in fact, two visions of America, one or the other of which moves to the forefront in response to certain patterns of external stimuli and conditions. The adherents of both these visions share a common vocabulary of values; they exalt democracy, freedom, individualism, peacefulness, and honesty and identify these as specifically “American values.” However, where they diverge is that in one version, the holistic version, America is regarded as an already realized ideal, needing only to be preserved and protected. The followers of this vision of America are uncomfortable with voices of dissent because dissent brings the perfection and fulfilled quality of this vision into question and in so doing brings the integrity of the group into question. Thus, it is a primarily defensive vision, which privileges qualities of sameness among Americans, builds upon this sameness as its foundation, and is therefore suspicious of differences. The other America—the liberals’—is a vision of a perfect America whose perfection has yet to be realized; it lies in the future. Here diversity and dissent are embraced as the engines by which America is to evolve into its promised perfection. From this point of view the realization of democracy and freedom is an ongoing project. The voices of workers, leftists, African Americans, ecologists, feminists, and promoters of peace are required as the impetuses that will propel this project toward its ultimate realization. Oddly enough, this view is functionally connected to the market, though ideologically skeptical of it. It is the market, with its dislodging of people from relations of family and community, its reduction of people to functions, and its sole measure of “how much can be gotten at how low a cost?” that has created the conditions under which women have been forced to leave/empowered to leave their traditional roles and African Americans have been gradually enabled to make some progress out of old social and economic shackles. After all, in market terms a person is a unit of labor, and a unit of labor ultimately is valuable according to how well it performs and how little it costs; gender, skin pigmentation, and ethnicity are irrelevant considerations.

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These two camps differ completely regarding the root assumptions about how society is constituted and the corresponding social priorities. Given two completely different contexts of meaning and value, the fact that the two sides share a common core vocabulary of words such as “liberty” becomes all the more confusing and difficult because the conflict is not actually over the word but rather over an entire context of meaning with differences that both sides fail to see and to comprehend. One side, the side of holistic integration, focuses on the group—an entity—and seeks to discover who is “in” the group—one of us—and therefore safe and who is “out”—one of them—and therefore dangerous, by examining how much people are like “us” in values, in beliefs, in culture, in ways of thinking and living, and, of course, in appearance. The other side, the side of functional integration, looks at issues of process—how open is the process? How free are individuals to contribute to it? And while this side also asks, “How beneficial are the results?” as we shall see, because it focuses on process and abhors the metaphysics involved in establishing entity, it skirts the question “for whom?” Between the two worldviews, there is little basis, or motivation for that matter, for mutual understanding and much basis for talking at cross purposes and mutual hostility—war by other means, in fact. Long ago, speaking on the subject of accurate language as the foundation of good governance, Confucius told a skeptical inquirer that [i]f names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. . . . Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.92 The Campus columnist Lou Gerson was saying much the same thing in 1948 when, deprecating the rhetorical ferocity of the Cold War era and its deleterious effect on democracy, he put the blame not only on politicians and other opinion leaders but also on the American people themselves, writing, “We lament that we are run by the so-called ‘politicians’ and that we have no spiritual guidance, while in fact we are mental cripples who adhere to abstract terms and phrases without trying to discover their actual meaning.”93 To seasoned adults, well-versed in the ways of the political world, Gerson’s high expectations of the public may seem unreasonably, naively, high. However, it may be remembered that Thomas Jefferson believed in democratic government only because he also believed that “[w]henever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government . . . whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”94 He saw that

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information—correct information—was critical to democracy because only on the basis of such information could voters be depended upon to make wise choices. But more fundamentally, since we all know that it is possible to use true facts to paint false pictures, he believed that a commitment to truth or (since truth may or may not be something knowable to humans) a commitment to the spirit of truth was the bedrock of genuine freedom; in short, “Light and liberty go together.”95 Bob Steiner, Richard Carleton Ward, A. Michael Pite, Mendel Heilig, Arthur Sherwood, and the others who participated in the exchange of letters chronicled here all aspired to a world that is free and democratic; however, like most of their elders within and without academia, while trying to push society in their own small ways toward their vision of the ideal, they chose to communicate in ways that show that they had decided that noble goals justified manipulative means, means that sacrificed freedom in the name of freedom. Lou Gerson was correct: the words and rhetorical ploys of “the people” themselves show that all too often they were struggling, not to triumph through truth, but merely to triumph.

Notes 1. Karl Von Clausewitz, On War, eds. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 69. 2. The Connecticut Daily Campus, February 13, 1948, 2. 3. David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 71. 4. Connecticut Campus, March 9, 1951, 2. Also, see Connecticut Campus, March 17, 1950, 4. There was also one case of on-campus red hunting when four professors were investigated for alleged communist ties by a faculty committee appointed by the faculty senate. However, despite some pressure from the governor of the state to dismiss the accused teachers, all four were exonerated after an investigation that was handled so quietly that it never appeared in the student press. For a brief account of this investigation see Lionel S. Lewis, Cold War on Campus: A Study of the Politics of Organizational Control (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988), 241–247. 5. A circular letter from a right-wing group in the FBI’s file on Hall tells its readers, “It is our duty to give you the name, address and description of a deceptive lying creature who is an agent for the enemy. If he should appear at any of your meetings or call to meet you at any time, you will know that you are in the presence of an agent of the invisible government. His name is Gordon D. Hall. . . . He is tall, slim, good-looking, well dressed, quiet manners, and reserved and likes the women. He is one of the stooges for the Anti-Defamation League and gathers information on patriotic ProAmerican groups to turn over to the Marxist Jews who are trying to abolish this government.” 6. For more on Hall, see Malcolm D. Rivkin, “Silhouette: Anti-Fascist Investigator,” The Harvard Crimson, November 6, 1951, 1. 7. M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 174. 8. Connecticut Campus, December 7, 1951, 1. 9. Connecticut Campus, 6.

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10. Connecticut Campus, December 10, 1951. 11. Connecticut Campus, December 12, 1951, 1. 12. For example, regarding the Chinese communist takeover in China, Moidel wrote, “Whether Mao-Tze-Tung or Mat-ze-Ball rules China would not decisively alter this present eruption of historical forces, and I do not believe that any famous American profiles and bullets will help our twentieth century Holy Alliance to make the world safe for such corrupt pigs as Franco, Chiang, and our new ally, the Nazi Beast.” Connecticut Campus, April 11, 1951, 4. 13. Connecticut Campus, December 12, 1951, 2. 14. Connecticut Campus, December 17, 1951, 2. 15. Connecticut Campus, January 7, 1952, 1. 16. Connecticut Campus, January 11, 1952, 2. 17. Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 106–107; Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 266; Heale, 104. 18. Ida Darden, a leader in Texas against women’s right to vote, against the New Deal, against civil rights, and against suspected communists, owned and edited The Southern Conservative, a right-wing newspaper published from 1950 to 1962. The publication targeted perceived communist and socialist influences in government and was financed largely by conservative Texas oilmen such as George W. Armstrong and Arch Rowan. 19. Connecticut Campus, February 13, 1952, 2. 20. Connecticut Campus, February 20, 1952, 2. 21. Ibid. 22. Connecticut Campus, March 3, 1952, 2. 23. Connecticut Campus, March 5, 1952, 2. 24. Connecticut Campus, March 10, 1952, 2. 25. Connecticut Campus, March 14, 1952, 2. 26. Connecticut Campus, March 19, 1952, 2. 27. Connecticut Campus, March 21, 1952, 2. 28. Connecticut Campus, March 3, 1952, 2. 29. Connecticut Campus, February 29, 1952, 2. 30. Connecticut Campus, April 18, 1952, 2. 31. Connecticut Campus, May 7, 1952, 2. 32. Connecticut Campus, March 21, 1952. 33. Connecticut Campus, January 7, 1952, 2. 34. Caute, 93. 35. Hartford Courant, February 9, 1952, 16 and February 10, 1952, 6. 36. Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1959), 7–8. 37. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 139. 38. Connecticut Campus, February 20, 1952, 2. 39. Connecticut Campus, March 10, 1952, 2. 40. Not all those who called themselves liberals would have accepted this analysis. Jack Moidel, a columnist for The Campus, called the equation of fascism and communism “the greatest lie perpetrated upon the American people,” emphasizing that it was the “acceptance of this myth for fact that makes war seem inevitable.” Connecticut Campus, May 9, 1951. 41. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949). 42. Connecticut Campus, February 13, 1948, 2.

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43. W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 56 (London, 1955–56), reprinted in Mad Black, ed., The Importance of Language (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 121–146 and William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1974), chap. 1. 44. Michel Foucault made a similar, though not identical, point in his 1975–1976 lectures at the Collège de France, collected and published under the title Society Must Be Defended. In that context, however, Foucault is addressing the broader issue of the constitution, or perhaps deconstitution, of society and addressing issues of sovereignty posed by Hobbes, not electoral politics per se. See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Allessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 45. Nor was Gramsci alone in this observation. As early as 1785 Archbishop William Paley wrote, “Could we view our own species from a distance, or regard mankind with the same sort of observation with which we read the natural history, or remark the manners, of any other animal there is nothing in the human character which would more surprise us, than the almost universal subjugation of strength to weakness—than to see many millions of robust men, in the complete use and exercise of their faculties, and without any defect of courage, waiting upon the will of a child, a woman, a driveller, or a lunatic. And although . . . we suppose perhaps an extreme case; yet in all cases, even in the most popular forms of civil government, the physical strength lies in the governed. In what manner opinion thus prevails over strength, or how power, which naturally belongs to superior force, is maintained in opposition to it; in other words, by what motives the many are induced to submit to the few, becomes an inquiry which lies at the root of almost every political speculation . . . civil authority is founded in opinion . . . general opinion therefore ought always to be treated with deference, and managed with delicacy and circumspection.” Archbishop William Paley, Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 1785 Book VI, ch. 2 quoted in Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 25–26. 46. Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 219. 47. Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 138. 48. Femia, 3. 49. Ibid., 24. 50. Ibid., 39. 51. Ibid., 42. For numerous examples of the manipulation of cultural symbols and core values to attain consent during the McCarthy era, see Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold War America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 52. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Hegemony and Consent,” in Approaches to Gramsci, ed. Anne Showstack Sassoon (London: Writers and Readers, 1982), 120. 53. Femia, 34–35. 54. Ibid., 44. 55. David McLellan, Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 27. 56. Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 101. 57. Ibid., 102.

War by Other Means 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

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Ibid., 120. Ibid., 121. Ibid. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Caute, 93. David A. Shannon, Between the Wars: America, 1919–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 24. What we remember and revere about Magna Carta are its protections of citizens by due process of law and the fact that it made the “rights of the freeman against the king . . . as sacred as those of the vassal against his lord”; however, as Sidney Painter points out, “Undoubtedly the provisions of Magna Carta that were of greatest interest to the baronial leaders were those providing for the reduction of extortionate fines and amercements and the restoration of lands, castles, and privileges improperly held by the crown.” Sidney Painter, The Reign of King John (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), 327 and 329. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 410–411. The Federalist Papers: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, Michael A. Genovese, ed. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 50. Jack P. Gibbs and Walter T. Martin, “Status Integration and Suicide,” The Sociology of Suicide, ed. Anthony Giddens (London: Frank Cass, 1971), 66–86. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 39. Ibid., 123. An anecdote appearing Robert M. Utley’s The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 gives a striking example of the contrast between mechanical and organic solidarity. Utley tells of a group of Sioux in Minnesota who in 1862 had “spread over the countryside, killing, raping, pillaging, and burning” as they rose to counter white incursions. At a critical moment, as they approached the major white population center, St. Paul, “divided counsel overtook the Indians.” Unable to agree on a target for their attack, the group split, some attacking Fort Ridgely, the rest, New Ulm (Utley, 79). It is nearly impossible to imagine a modern army dividing itself so casually on the basis of an internal disagreement, not merely because of the strength of the hierarchical principle, but also because such an army would be articulated into different sections such as the artillery, cavalry, infantry, engineers, etc., all inter-related and mutually dependent. So, with organic solidarity the “different parts of the aggregate, since they fulfill different functions, cannot be easily separated” (Durkheim, 103). Louis Dumont, German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 8. Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 212. Lynn Dumenil reminds us that in the early pages of the classic satire of middle-class culture of the 1920s, Babbitt, “Sinclair Lewis painstakingly describes the material objects that formed such a crucial part of George F. Babbitt’s sense of identity and well-being.” Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 76. Dumont, German Ideology, 9–10. Durkheim, 335. Ibid., 294. Ibid., 308.

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77. Ibid., xxxix. 78. Ibid., lii. 79. For a good brief discussion of Durkheim’s optimistic but apparently unrealistic view that social justice might prove more fundamental than market forces, see Frank Parkin, Durkheim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 59–72. 80. Dumenil, 124. 81. Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 116. 82. Ibid., 118. 83. Ibid., 113. 84. Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley, 1984), reprinted in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, eds. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (New York: University of California Press, 1995), 526. 85. Ibid., 525. 86. Ibid., 529. 87. Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 69. 88. Ibid., 259. 89. Ibid., 293. 90. MacLean, 59. 91. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Conservative,” in Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1849), 285–286. 92. James Legge, trans., Confucius: Confucian Analects, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), 263–264. 93. Connecticut Campus, February 13, 1948, 2. 94. Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, January 8, 1789; Julian P. Boyd., ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 14 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 420. 95. Thomas Jefferson to Tench Coxe, June 1, 1795; John Catanzariti, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 28 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 373.

3

Homer G. Richey and the Political Power of a Symbol

In April 1951, a little more than a year after Senator Joe McCarthy gave the speech that inaugurated his brief political reign of terror, the editors of the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, made a conscious decision to invite a little controversy; they ran a reprint of an editorial from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This editorial was a critical comment on an article by Whitney Griswold, the then newly appointed president of Yale, calling for Americans not to allow institutions of higher education to be destroyed by the exigencies of the Korean War, the Cold War, and the battle against internal communist subversion. As Griswold put it, “If the long-run objective of communism is to destroy our free society at its source, the farther we go toward stripping our colleges of students, dismissing their teachers, and ‘accelerating’ their curricula, the nearer the Communists will have got to achieving that objective.”1 The Times-Dispatch faulted Griswold for ignoring that there were colleges and universities (none named) that had become “notorious as hotbeds of Marxism” and that there were college and university presidents who had not recognized the “the folly of preaching ‘tolerance’ toward the Marxist creed of beehive slavery.” “Trojan horse Marxists” had been allowed to tamper with the “fountainhead of technological and ideological verities” so that rather than the “clear, cold water of learning,” what was emerging was a “stream of pink, tepid lemonade, its sentimental sweetness concealing the taste of the made-in-Moscow vodka.” The lesson? The “fountain of culture” needs some cleaning out.2 Alongside this editorial, The Cavalier Daily published a response from Allen W. Moger, Professor of History at Washington and Lee University and historian of the post-bellum South. Moger struck the customary tone of the beleaguered liberal, caught between left and right and seeking a balanced point of view, agreeing, on the one hand, that “communists should not be tolerated on college teaching staffs,” but also protesting that the Times-Dispatch editorial was simply another one of “many references to ‘college pinks’” that represented a “careless,” “reckless and irresponsible” abuse of language, conflating “reds,” “pinks,” and progressives without ever clearly stating what was meant by these terms. “Is the public,” Moger

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asked, “to be told time and again that liberal or objective teachers are friends of Moscow and hence dangerous?” Moger went on to argue that any “teacher worth his salt has the obligation to be critical, to search for new truths and fresh insights, discover how changes and readjustments have been made in the past, and to point to possible improvements for the weaknesses of present society” and that those who irresponsibly hurled epithets of “red” and “pink” were “raising the hue and cry against one of the most important and defenseless groups in American society.” Furthermore, he questioned whether the editorialist could identify any concrete examples of colleges that had knowingly tolerated communists on their faculties, pointing out that communists were “a species incompatible with the freedom of inquiry and opinion essential to the integrity of the teaching profession.” Such as might be found on any faculty should be “ruthlessly exposed and removed.” Finally, Moger discussed the vulnerable position of teachers generally, people whose main purpose was to serve, people with many years of training and a relatively meager remuneration for their social contribution. He quoted Laird Hill, a Chicago attorney, who stated in a speech before a recent convocation of the Massachusetts Bar Association, it is a “wonder . . . that the amount of radicalism among teachers is so small. For it takes either an optimistic teacher or stupid one to think that his salary is going to keep up with the shrinking dollar. The only thing the teacher has left is his academic freedom and a responsible press should understand how priceless that is.”3 Having printed these two pieces side by side, The Cavalier Daily invited members of both the faculty and student body to comment, thereby raising a storm that would eventually reach the student editors themselves. Two days later, the first two responses appeared, one by a student and one by a teacher, Homer G. Richey. The student, who identified himself4 only as “PMC,” made an initial effort to be evenhanded, acknowledging that the modern newspaper, in its efforts to sell its product, was likely to give “our daily modern scene” a “twist” and allowing that the TimesDispatch editorial had made some “sweeping generalities about ‘pinks’ and ‘Reds,’ and ‘pink tepid lemonade.’” However, PMC wrote, turning to what apparently was his real concern, Moger was guilty of an “even more dangerous generalization” in averring that “there are no Reds or pinks on our college campuses.” Worse yet, PMC continued, Moger had gone so far as to “condone Marxist tendencies wrapping them in the most inviolable cloak of academic freedom.” PMC conceded that he (and, he very considerately pointed out, Dr. Moger) was not “exposed to communism in the schools of Virginia,” for Virginian teachers were of “a high degree of rationality and moral fiber,” but that did not warrant being “lulled into a false sense of feeling that because it isn’t here, it isn’t anywhere.” He urged Moger to get out of his shell and talk to some of the people who had left Virginia’s unsullied ideological atmosphere and later returned “either

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doubting that our form of government is the best or convinced that it is not.” Worst of all, the people most likely to undergo this kind of terrible transformation were “the very ones who are most interested in affairs of government as a life’s work.” The real danger, PMC warned his readers, was that “[t]o a young and pliable mind it isn’t even a jump, but merely a short step from being a little liberal to communism,” and though “[w]e want no witch hunts,” it is most dangerous to oust card bearing communists in our colleges and universities and then sit back and feel secure. Marx’s message was too little thought out and can mean too many things to too many people for any of us to relax until the word communism has come to mean as little as “gerrymandering.”5 In the same issue of the paper, another, more formidable champion of the McCarthyist position also entered the lists, Homer G. Richey. The Cavalier Daily staff identified him as “a University Political Science professor and WCRV commentator”; in fact, he was an assistant professor in the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs who also had a regular slot as a conservative political commentator on a local radio station. Richey’s first sentence set the tone of this letter and, indeed, many letters and events to come: he began by labeling Moger’s essay as “one of the most asinine bits of special pleading I have ever heard.” Richey continued in what would be a prolonged analysis by color: [Moger’s] conclusion appears to be that unless a person is a cardcarrying Communist by no stretch of the imagination can he be called “red” or “pink”. I wonder what color Dr. Moger would use to designate the so-called “progressives”, who, up until a couple of years ago, were loud in their praise of the glorious Soviet Union? Violet, perhaps? It may be wondered whether by invoking the color “violet,” Richey meant to cast aspersions of homosexuality on his opponents; the more usual color association in that case, however, would have been “lavender.” In any case, there can be little doubt that he intended to cast some kind of aspersion. Getting down to brass tacks, Richey addressed Moger’s assertion that Virginia’s teachers were free from reddish or pinkish taint by stating that there were three people, none listed by name, in his own department who manifested some degree of “redness,” the first of whom allegedly had objected to the appointment of a new faculty member in 1945 (later to be revealed as Richey himself) on the grounds that the nominee was “anti-Russian”; this same anonymous suspect was accused of “plugging for programs of American appeasement of Russia” and advocating US recognition of the communist Chinese government. Unnamed

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suspect number two, Richey explained, had “very recently come out frankly and openly and said, ‘I’m a socialist.’” And of course, “[i]f a communist is red by definition, surely a socialist must be a pink.” Then Richey came to the most inflammatory part of his discourse, inflammatory because it entered the arena of mainstream politics and political beliefs and commitments associated with contemporary liberalism and liberals: I would call still another person a pink, and an even more dangerous one than the frank one mentioned above, who believes in the principle of “the public ownership of property,” a regimentation over economic life by the state along the New-Fair Deal pattern (which is socialistic by definition), who plugs openly in favor of FEPC [the Fair Employment Practices Committee], pushes American recognition of Red China and believes that if we can’t bankrupt America by socialistic projects at home, then we ought to hasten the project by global spending projects abroad. If these aren’t the earmarks of a fellow traveler, then just how do you tell one when you see him? And finally, Richey concluded with a stock invocation of the Enemy Within, addressing Moger directly and letting him know that “[y]ou don’t have to go outside the State of Virginia, Dr. Moger, to find specimens of the types described above. They are right here in the midst of us.”6 Having thrown down the gauntlet and labeled virtually all liberals and many centrists of both political parties (it was still possible to be a liberal or moderate Republican in those days) “fellow travelers” and, by implication, disloyal, Richey instigated the outraged responses that he surely hoped for; two days later the first answering letters appeared. A short one by “T. Goeller” took a sarcastic tone, affecting to rejoice in the discovery that “all who back the present administration or anyone who voted Democratic in ANY presidential election since 1932 are ‘Pinks,’” a fact “proven through and through by their un-American action of voting for the President of the United States!”7 Another student signing himself “Open Minded” attempted a more thorough analysis of the two letters that had appeared on the 19th. He interpreted Richey’s letter as meaning that socialists, because they are pink, should be denied the right to teach; he then went on to note that communism and socialism are different “philosophies” and wondered whether Richey would “suggest that we break with England because she is socialist?” Continuing, Open Minded linked Richey’s vein of thought to that of PMC, particularly the startling observation that “to a young and pliable mind it isn’t even a jump, but merely a short step from being a little liberal to communism.” Does that mean, Open Minded asked, that we should now ban all liberals and all progressives? He foresaw a future in which “only conservatives would be tolerated in our ‘Brave New World.’”

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On a deeper level, Open Minded suggests, the two letters joined in embracing a “subtle form” of thought control: the youth of America must be protected from contact with “liberal” thoughts. Like most university liberals, Open Minded believed it necessary to be seen as tough on communism, urging that “[w]hen a person is an avowed communist, get rid of him.” However, he emphasized the standard point upon which liberals in these debates all agreed: “It is by understanding and seeing both points of view that a person may reach an intelligent judgment and decision.”8 A few days later another response to Richey appeared in the form of a column written by one of the regular contributors to The Cavalier Daily, Gene Bruns. Bruns took another tack in his assault on Richey, mockingly proposing a line of logic that would end in Richey’s being identified with Soviet communism; after all, before World War II, had not Roosevelt started to make economic and military assistance to the British available in their fight with Hitler? And did not communists, in line with Soviet policy, oppose such aid? And did not Richey’s own openly espoused views commit him to opposition to such “global spending plans which would ruin our country”? The same line of thought, Bruns wrote, would commit Richey to opposition to the Marshall Plan, also opposed by the communists. The same logic would apply to Truman’s Point Four program (a program for economic aid to poor countries announced by United States President Harry S. Truman in his inaugural address on January 20, 1949) as well as US aid to South America. Bruns went on: “The Communists find that it is much easier to gain control of countries in which the people are starving and are easy prey for their promises which never materialize. Does Mr. Richey want to make the Reds’ job easier?”9 Yet another student, signing himself “Jeffersonian”—a pseudonym that at the University of Virginia was almost tantamount to an appeal to the sacred—took Richey on over his use of the term “fellow traveler.” Jeffersonian focused on the phrase that defined a fellow traveler as one “who believes in the public ownership of property” and asserted that “[a]ccording to this part of Richey’s definition, anyone who believes in public ownership of schools, prisons, public libraries, highways or post offices is a fellow-traveler.” Picking up on earlier arguments regarding Richey’s attack on the New and Fair Deals, Jeffersonian pointed out that the logical conclusion must be that the “majority of American voters in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948 were fellow-travelers.” If you can tell a fellow traveler by their supporting US recognition of the communist Chinese government, he argued, why then, those who advocate recognition of Spain and Argentina (and Jeffersonian counts himself among these) much be fascists or at least pro-fascists. Finally, the only conclusion Jeffersonian can find in Richey’s letter is that “anyone who happens to disagree with Homer G. Richey is a communist, or a fellow-traveler, or a pink, or even if he isn’t, I’ll label him one anyways.”10

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At this point—and, one senses, with relish—Richey reentered the fray with a letter that—since they are not mentioned—was apparently written before Jeffersonian’s letter and Bruns’s article were published. He begins by pointing out that both Goeller and “Mr. O.-Minded” had read more into his letter than was actually there and claims to be in at least one respect more liberal-minded than either of those two since he, Richey, actually has no objection to a card-carrying communist teaching in the University PROVIDED he is identified as such and that everybody is aware of the bill of goods he is peddling. I don’t even object to socialists, provided they come out and say they are socialists, and don’t go around indulging in the slimy intellectual pastimes of disguising their wares under such blandishing titles as “economic planning”, “greater social services for all.” In fact, I am so liberal (in the genuine sense of the word) that a couple of years back, when the International Relations Club invited the Ambassador of the present Soviet Puppet Polish State here to speak, I not only encouraged the Club in this project, I was one of the few people around here who was not afraid to be seen in public and on the same platform with him. It’s a good thing to have a clear conscience in these matters! Richey goes on to claim that he is merely in favor of everyone who does teach being forthright about their underlying beliefs. His concern about communists, then, is not so much that he cares about getting them out, but that he believes that once they are in, “they are for getting out everyone who doesn’t agree with them.” He ends with an admonition to “Mr. O.-Minded” to “learn a little history,” telling him that he is mistaken that only difference between communism and socialism is based on a “power-political” validity, that their ideological origin is the same, and that until World War I “there were no communists as distinguished from socialist parties.”11 More responses came in to the newspaper. A student signing himself “WAC,” apparently writing before having read Richey’s second salvo, reached back to the first two letters criticizing Moger. He struck a theme common to liberals when defending themselves against McCarthyist offensives: the world is not a place of black and white alternatives; it includes intermediate shades. Like Jeffersonian, the main burden of WAC’s refutation of Richey came in the form of pointing out that both public and private ownership existed in the US, without our being a socialist country. He went on to ask—he thought rhetorically: Would he [Richey] advocate the abolishment of the present Federally operated postal system? In order to do away with regimentation,

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would he do away with, say, a Federal Communications Commission, the Maritime Commission, the Security and Exchange Commission, or the authority charged with the enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Laws—just to mention a few administrative agencies? Then WAC went on to hit another point that would gradually emerge as being of some importance in the months to come; he wrote, “And it may or may not be of any significance but the use of the word ‘asinine’ and referring to an article of a colleague to which one is replying seemed a little inappropriate.” He wondered whether Richey’s dual role as radio commentator and university teacher was altogether proper given the “commercial domination and political browbeating” associated with Richey’s career as a radio personality. Finally, regarding the other antiMoger letter, that of PMC, WAC questioned the notion that it was anybody’s task to mold anybody’s mind in the university. For that matter, he asked, “[s]hould the minds of any nation be molded, and if so, by whom and for what purpose?”12 Two days later, on April 28, T. Goeller felt called by Richey’s second missive to return to the fray. He acknowledged Richey’s statement that he (Richey) did not seek to purge the university of reds or pinks but merely sought to ensure that they owned up to their respective ideologies. Goeller went on to hope that “[s]ince it is, by now, well-established that a socialist is anyone who has voted for the President of the United States since 1932,” all who had done so would “immediately file statements with Mr. Richey to that effect.”13 Yet another letter, printed that same day, proved to have a furtherreaching impact than any of the replies to Richey yet published. It would, in fact, lead first to a lawsuit and then, ultimately, to Richey’s dismissal. It was signed “Cerebrus.”14 Cerebrus directed his arrows, not so much at the substance of Richey’s letters, but rather at Richey himself. He pointed to Richey’s “unusual anxiety to make himself heard,” noting that “his Tuesday tirades have already become a matter of public debate” (referring to Richey’s radio broadcasts). Richey’s writings and radio talks put Cerebrus in mind of a short story that appeared recently dealing with a rather ineffective and incompetent University professor whose relations with the faculty, students, and administration were rapidly deteriorating. This gentleman’s trouble was distinctly nonideological. His ambition was simply not scaled to fit his very limited ability. At the prospect of being fired, our hero devised a plan whereby his dismissal could be made to seem the grossest violation of academic freedom. A vicious plot, conceived by his personal enemies, would be revealed at the proper moment (with the aid of a non-suspecting student). Aroused

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In fact, Cerebrus was recounting the plot of a story recounted in Mary McCarthy’s book The Groves of Academe (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), the first chapter of which had just been published in The New Yorker on February 3, 1951. Cerebrus went on to warn Richey that, having aired the issues being discussed in The Cavalier Daily on his radio program, he had taken his argument “out of the realm of scholarly inquiry into the cold light of public scrutiny,” thereby divesting himself “of the protective mantle that properly belongs to those who teach.” And then, somewhat ominously, “He is a legitimate target for attack.” Cerebrus continued, mockingly suggesting alternative means for Richey to make a living that might be more appropriate than the university. He then finished with an ironic warning note: But if he desires to remain a teacher, let him remember that his enemies are many and unscrupulous, and that against such odds, no defensive expedient should be beneath him. As we all know, a noble end justifies the basest means.15 This same day, in an editorial entitled “Fire the Columnists?” the editors of The Cavalier Daily acknowledged the hornets’ nest that they had stirred up. They told how an unhappy reader of the political right had written demanding the head of Gene Bruns for his discussion of Richey and how another reader, Bill McFarland, had gone after conservative columnist Marion Harrison III in terms so unvarnished that “Harrison was all set to take McFarland to the courts for a time.” The editors then stated their own position: The Cavalier is certainly making no effort to present a one-sided features page. We believe the airing of opinion differences to be one of the essentials in a successful democratic society. The features page should be ample proof that our policy in that respect is successful. For instance, Bruns and John Loflin are Democrats. Harrison is a rabid Republican, Loflin attacks Harrison, Harrison attacks Loflin (and the editorial column), and the readers, through the Letters column, give everybody the word, including each other. No, we’ll not be axing the columnists. It should be clear, however, that their views do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.16 A few days later, the editors printed one of the two letters mentioned earlier, the one attacking Gene Bruns. The essential issue was that the letter writer, Richard E. Jones III, missed the irony of Bruns’s piece (which

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suggested that Richey was espousing ideological positions favored by communists). “The indications of the writer that Mr. Richey is a fellow traveler are so absurd that they need no refutation,” Jones fulminated, and he castigated The Cavalier Daily for lending its pages to “this sort of ‘tripe.’”17 That same day, Homer G. Richey raised his epistolary head once more. Rhetorically immoderate as ever, he asked Bruns, aren’t you ashamed . . . for calling me a pink? ? If you aren’t careful, people will misunderstand and lump you in with that dreadful fascist clique, striving to throttle academic freedom at the University and persecuting our poor, long-suffering and oh, oh, so innocent fellow travelers. If you keep on at this rate, you’ll soon be in Congress, heading the Un-American Activities Committee in the witch hunts. Then he continued in a more serious vein to try to correct what he saw as some mistaken views on the part of other letter writers. He contended that it was “a peculiarly modern fallacy that all we have to do to stop communism is to fill people’s stomachs,” asserting that the problem of communism was primarily political and only secondarily economic. Regarding the Marshall Plan, Richey stated that it was a matter of fact that “it was intended to turn over a lot of money to communist dominated countries.” Why? The way the left-wingers in the State Department figured it was like this: “if you can’t lick ’em, jine ’em’ but let’s weaken the project as much as we can by subsidizing German violin makers, French perfume makers and the like so when the question of military aid comes up we will have already spent so much that we can’t spend anymore.” Of course there were a lot of well-meaning non-Communists and Americans who supported the Marshall Plan and Point Four nonsense. But a lot of fellow travelers hopped on the bandwagon too. Don’t ever think they didn’t.18 Thinking perhaps that he was being sly by conjoining their names, he suggested that “Joe Stalin and Henry Wallace” had ceased opposing the Marshall Plan, having decided to follow Lenin’s advice and allow the United States to spend itself into bankruptcy. And, with a final wish for “bigger and better FBIs and Senator McCarthies,” he ended his missive.19 In the same issue, Gene Bruns, a chief target of Richey’s perhaps not ire, but at least irritation, wrote a column addressing Richey and the other critic, Richard Jones. Bruns tried to set Jones straight regarding the ironic intention of the piece that had set Jones off, and he tried to educate Richey regarding the anticommunist intentions behind the Marshall Plan, adding,

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“The paragraph [in Richey’s letter] which describes the motives of the men who make our foreign policy and conceived the Marshall Plan does not need or want any comment.” Following this line of thought, he went on with a certain weariness: The discouraging element about this controversy is that instead of throwing any light or bringing to the surface any facts which would help us to better meet the crisis which is facing all of us, it only clouds the issues and makes more difficult any comprehension of the situation. It is much too easy to call one a red or a pink; it saves us from thinking and doing any constructive work. Honest differences of opinion are strongly desired, indeed they are necessary if we are to survive: name-calling and smears are not, for they prove nothing and only generate confusion.20 Richey decided it was once again time to answer his critics in the letters column in The Cavalier Daily. Responding to the letter from “Mr. WAC (wonder why he left off last syllable?—KY we should think),” Richey wrote: The other day I said in class that the best way to tell a socialist is one person comes at you with the postal system. Sure enough, Wacky stuck the postal system in. Actually there’s no good reason why the postal system shouldn’t be privately operated, except we’ve gotten used to it the way it is. Regarding other government functions such as the FCC and the Maritime Commission, Richey argued that these had a proper function as impartial referees; however, when government agencies either functioned to redistribute wealth or, like the TVA, ran competitively with private capital, “then we are on the way to socialism.” And he hoped that “some other WAC(ky) will come along soon arguing that we can have socialism and still preserve the ‘democratic process’” because he (Richey) had some comments he would like to make on that score as well.21 Then on May 2 The Cavalier Daily announced that Richey had dropped something of a bombshell: while Gene Bruns may have been the object of his irritation, it appears that Cerebrus was the object of his honest-togoodness ire. A large front-page headline that day read: RICHEY CLAIMS LETTER TO THE EDITOR WAS LIBELOUS— THREATENS SUIT. ALSO WARNS CAVALIER EDITORS THAT PAPER MAY BE CHARGED According to The Cavalier Daily editor-in-chief Curt Bazemore, Richey had telephoned him, demanding to know the real name of “Cerebrus.” It

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seems that Richey had decided that the tale that Cerebrus had recounted in his letter was libelous and, though Richey said nothing about it at the time, because—as we shall see—the story was startlingly apropos in a way that seemed to indicate access to information that a student should not have had, Richey was convinced that one of his colleagues was secretly behind this letter. The telephone call was “not of a conciliatory nature,” according to Bazemore, and, in fact, Richey’s tone was “abrupt and imperious.” Bazemore put him off, saying that he believed it would be unfair to Cerebrus to disclose his name without letting him know first what was going on. Also, Bazemore wanted to explore the possible ramifications of Richey’s actions and wanted also to ascertain what The Cavalier Daily’s legal position in this matter might be. Bazemore had no luck in getting Cerebrus and then, speaking to Richey again, again refused to give up the name on the grounds that “it would be unfair to do so without first advising the writer of the letter of what was occurring.” At this point Richey informed Bazemore that he and the other editors might also be charged with libel. Bazemore then tried to contact Cerebrus again and managed this time to find him; Cerebrus was reluctant to disclose his identity but agreed to do so in time for the Saturday deadline if no other agreement could be negotiated. Baffled in his attempt to get Cerebrus’s name, Richey went to an attorney, D. B. Marshall of the local law firm of Paxson, Marshall, and Smith, who sent Bazemore as well as Managing Editor Stage Blackford, Associate Editor Fred Eastham, and Editorial Associates John Loflin, Lou Firey, and Marion Harrison letters stating that it was his belief, and Richey’s, that Cerebrus’s letter “contained libelous matter,” and that if the newspaper had not furnished Richey with Cerebrus’s real name before Saturday, May 8, he would be “forced to the conclusion that the letter represents the official position of The Cavalier Daily, you (Bazemore) as editor, and the editorial staff.”22 In the days that followed, both sides held firm to their respective positions, with The Cavalier Daily staff refusing to disclose the name and Richey continuing to threaten to bring suit against them both “collectively and individually.” Richey made it clear to The Cavalier Daily that his “chief interest” in threatening to bring suit against the paper was “the finding out of the REAL AUTHOR of the Cerebrus letter,” adding, “I am very reluctant to initiate a prosecution directed against college students, but if I’m forced to do so, I shall.” The Cavalier Daily now being an active participant in the unfolding drama, Bazemore printed an editorial explaining the course of events from his point of view. He believed that Richey had chosen a “most unfortunate method of retaliation” since “legal action concerning an academic controversy is bound to reflect on the institution in question,” adding that Richey was “not the type of person one can reason with.”23

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This was followed by an open letter to Richey in which Bazemore again repeated the events that had led up to this contretemps and defended his own actions, writing: Mr. Richey, we did not precipitate this unhappy affair. We acted in perfectly good faith and accepting for publication all the letters in question. We intend to keep that faith. Had the contents of the Cerebrus letter been libelous or inflammatory, we should not have accepted it. On the contrary, the letter was intelligent and informative. Declaring his own intention to hold firm to his position, Bazemore went on to urge Richey to give more considered thought to his actions before instituting legal proceedings, reminding him that as “a member of an august and responsible body” in the University of Virginia, Richey had a responsibility to his fellow faculty members, to the students, and to the university as an institution. Bazemore suggested that Richey was putting himself in danger of losing the respect of students, faculty, and administration and also that he was bringing disrepute on the entire institution.24 The editors of The Cavalier Daily were undoubtedly emboldened by the fact that they had in the meantime consulted “several lawyers and other informed persons” regarding their legal position and had found the consensus to be that Cerebrus’s letter was not libelous. And it transpired that Cerebrus himself had taken legal counsel and, on the basis of that advice, had decided to continue to withhold his identity, writing that he did “not intend to be intimidated by threats of resort to the courts,” courts that were not “designed to be used as threats to editors of college newspapers,” especially when “the suit in question is based on suspicion of a nonexistent conspiracy.” Cerebrus went on to declare that it should be made quite clear that our first letter was not the result of a conspiracy, that it was in no way inspired or suggested by any member of the faculty or administration and that it was conceived and executed by one student who now discovers that his public inquiry into the motives of one member of the faculty was accidentally and painfully acute.25 Students writing to the newspaper seemed mystified. James A. Kerr wrote, “I personally can see nothing libelous in that letter.” In fact, Kerr added, summing up a bit of the spirit of the times, “to call a person communistic or socialistic is in these days tantamount to calling him a liar and/or traitor and far more grounds for a libel suit than anything said or construed to have been said by Cerebrus.”26 And Don Miller was “pained” to see a faculty member “stoop to such a degrading act” and “childish antics” as suing a student and reasoned further that a “man who is as violent in his opinions is Mr. Richey should hardly take offense to a rebuttal.” He

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wondered that since “one is allowed to write what he pleases about the President of the University without getting into trouble . . . [w]hy should Mr. Richey be so sensitive?”27 All this talk of conspiracies sounds quite mysterious, and since it cannot possibly be clear to the reader why the Cerebrus letter might be considered libelous and since it may seem odd that a teacher should be implying that certain of his colleagues were red or pink—though, to be sure, this was the McCarthy era—this would seem to be the place to go into the background of this affair, a background to which the students of the University of Virginia were not privy but which Cerebrus had “accidentally and painfully” penetrated.

The Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs Early in 1946, Jesse H. Jones, former head of the Reconstruction Finance Committee under the Roosevelt administration, donated $300,000 to start a school of foreign affairs, specializing in training students in the contemporary problems of international relations at the University of Virginia, and then-president of the university, John Lloyd Newcomb, appointed a faculty committee to draw up plans. Shortly afterward Newcomb appointed Hardy Dillard, Professor of Law, as acting head of the school; Dillard’s task was to make preliminary plans for organizing the school. Dillard was called to the War College in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1946 and was replaced by Robert Kent Gooch, Chairman of the School of Political Science, as acting head. The school opened for teaching in the fall of 1946, offering ten courses to some 275 students, of whom 18 were graduate students working toward a master’s degree. It had a teaching staff of three assistant professors, Homer Gilmer Richey, Alfred P. Fernbach, and Charles Micaud—Fernbach and Micaud both transfers from the School of Political Science—all holding temporary positions. At the end of the first year, Gooch resigned and Newcomb appointed Oron J. Hale of the History Department in his stead. Hale stayed one year and, upon resigning to teach history full time, was temporarily replaced by the three assistant professors acting as a committee with Fernbach as chair. In the meantime, Newcomb had left as president of the university and in 1947 had been replaced by Colgate W. Darden, Jr. Darden, a member of the powerful political machine of Harry F. Byrd, was already prominent in the state, having served as a Democratic Congressman for two terms (1933–1937, 1939–1941), as Governor of Virginia (1942–1946), and as Chancellor of the College of William and Mary (1946–1947). A search committee composed of the three former acting heads of the Woodrow Wilson School—Dillard, Gooch, and Hale—had been looking for a permanent head, and in June 1949 they settled on John Gange. Gange, a

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native of Lindsay, California, came to his position from the post of Executive Secretary of the Central Secretariat of the Economic Cooperation Administration, a US government agency setup in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan. Gange had served previously in the State Department as Assistant Chief of the Caribbean Office, as Executive Secretary, United States Section, Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, and as the Acting Executive Secretary of the Central Secretariat, Department of State. He accepted his new position with the understanding “that he would have a free hand in determining the composition of his staff, since none of the current incumbents held permanent tenure.”28 Fernbach and Micaud had already been working for the university in the Department of Political Science. Richey, however, had entered by a different route, one that from the beginning was marked by controversy.

Homer G. Richey Homer Gilmer Richey was born on June 7, 1908. As he describes it, “I [was] raised in a down to earth Baptist family, most of whom believed that as far as Heaven was concerned, only Baptists need apply. I can remember my Grandmother Richey saying, ‘There was only one John the Baptist. Nobody ever heard of John the Methodist or John the Presbyterian.’”29 Richey received his MA at the University of Virginia in June 1930 and then served as an instructor for one year at Columbia University. Then, in June 1933, he sailed for Germany, intending a one-year stay; however, he remained three years, earning a Ph. D. in Philosophy at Goettingen in November 1935, writing his dissertation on German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey and John Dewey (whose instrumentalism Richey characterized as “philosophy awash in a sea of non-existent norms”). He received a grade of “Good” and then went on to study another year at Freiburg under philosopher Martin Heidegger. One of the effects of Richey’s study had been to make him “sort of, but not really very seriously, agnostic.” However, in the spring of 1934 he had a life-changing experience. He was loaned a German edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; this brought him “back to Jesus Christ with a bang” and kept him there for the rest of his life.30 Richey returned to the United States in 1936, where he began to teach German at the University of Virginia. Upon the entry of the US into World War II, he joined the Army, where his language skills were put to work in the School of Military Government teaching German. He also gave lectures and supervised staff study groups at the Disarmament School at London. By the time the war was over and he was considering what to do next, he had been promoted to captain, US Army, assigned to the Civil Affairs Division of the War Department, Washington, DC.31 He was still in the Army, stationed at the Pentagon, when he received the appointment to the Woodrow Wilson School. According to Richey’s

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account, his options at that time were to (1) remain in the War Department in civilian status at a salary of $7–8,000, (2) go to Germany in some military government position, or (3) get a civilian job at the same salary. He also writes that he was in negotiations with Professor Max Schoen, Head of the Philosophy Department at Carnegie Tech, and Professor Charles Gauss, Head of the Philosophy Department at George Washington University, for a teaching position. However, he broke these discussions off when Dillard in the early days of organizing the Woodrow Wilson School offered him an associate professorship. Dillard had a previous connection with Richey, having been the Director of Studies in the School of Military Government in Charlottesville during World War II, where Richey served under him as an instructor in German. According to the records of the university, “[i]t appears that the original idea of Mr. Dillard’s recommendation was that Mr. Richey should devote most his time to administrative work along with the teaching of, perhaps, one course.”32 Richey himself disputes this in his account but offers no evidence beyond an opinion based on conjecture. In any case, the conditions of his appointment are hazy. He took the position and made his arrangements. It was then, he says, that he was told that then-President Newcomb would not agree to an associate professorship for him but only an assistant professorship at top salary for that rank.33 These issues aside, difficulties were raised by the other members of the committee that had been formed to help establish the school, notably from Richey’s colleague-to-be Alfred Fernbach. Richey would later charge, time and again, that Fernbach had opposed his hiring because Richey was too “anti-Russian,” but Fernbach later testified that he “did not and could not have opposed his appointment on the basis of his political views, since I had never before heard of Mr. Richey and consequently did not know his views.” Rather it was “the manner in which . . . [the appointment] was made” that bothered Fernbach. He and the other committee members were “indignant” because Dillard had secured Richey’s appointment without consulting them. According to Fernbach, Dillard mollified them by telling them that he needed Richey to handle the administrative work of the school since he (Dillard) had to be in Washington much of the time.34 Apparently Dillard himself had had some early doubts about Richey; a letter to Dillard secured by Richey from Lieutenant Colonel Stanley J. Leland mentions that Leland had heard that Dillard was “somewhat hesitant regarding his [Richey’s] background for teaching international relations.” Leland reassured Dillard that he need not worry, that “Homer is a great boy” and “[i]f he wants to teach for you, you’d better grab him.”35 However, once Richey had joined the university faculty, problems started to arise: in 1948 there are intimations of complaints regarding Richey’s teaching, with Richey writing a letter to President Darden stating, “[y]ou will recall our recent conversation, during the course of which you

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intimated that there had been some criticism of my abilities as a teacher from certain quarters.” To reassure the president, Richey sent along a group of 14 student letters of commendation, all attesting to Richey’s good qualities as a teacher.36 During this time, Richey pursued his own political interests, and in 1949 he established an organization called Americans for Free Enterprise, which published two pamphlets, the first being a general attack on the New Deal and the second dealing with the current North Carolina Democratic primary in support of Richey’s preferred candidate, the conservative Willis Smith.37 On the academic front, it appears that, despite the early complaints, matters went along smoothly for Richey until May 1950, when Gange decided that it was time to face the issue of permanent appointments. He recommended the promotions of both Micaud and Fernbach to associate professorships but not Richey. Gange clearly believed that this particular decision needed careful thought and justification; in a letter to Darden, he wrote as much, giving two full pages to his description of the selection process he had employed. Gange remarks that he had become aware, even before he took up his duties as head of the Woodrow Wilson School, that Richey was a “controversial figure toward whom there were strong reactions, both favorable and unfavorable,” with the unfavorable comments outnumbering the favorable. However, he expresses appreciation for Richey’s general cooperativeness, his “efforts at objectivity,” and his “blunt” approach to teaching, remarking on the “salutary” effect that had on some students. However, Gange writes, he found himself returning “repeatedly” to the test of “whether or not I would ask for his appointment as associate professor if he were not now on the staff” and set up six criteria for arriving at a judgment: 1. What was his training for teaching foreign affairs? Richey’s academic training had been in philosophy and German language and literature, “with serious inadequacies in international economics, law and organization.” 2. What published research had he done in the field? He had no publications aside from letters and verses published in local newspapers on “aspects of domestic U. S. politics” and “a few book reviews.” 3. What was his “hands on” experience as a “practitioner” in the field? He had taught German in the School of Military Government and had spent time in military government in Germany and the War Department, “doing some political reporting along with a wide variety of other duties,” all of which added up to “very limited experience.” 4. What was his standing in the profession? Richey was generally unknown by other professionals, a fact that Gange attributed to

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Richey’s not participating in professional meetings and his lack of publications. And, in a phrase that would later become a point of special contention, Gange wrote that “of these few [who knew of Richey] there are as many who have been antagonized by his pronounced isolationism as there are who have been gratified by his version of ‘Americanism.’” 5. What promise did he show as a scholar and teacher in the coming 20 years? In Gange’s mind, given the aforementioned factors, very little. He did, however, foresee Richey developing a reputation for a “conservative, isolationist approach,” a position “very widely held in this country” and one meriting some representation in a school of foreign affairs, but not sufficiently, in combination with “two highly specialized courses” on Germany and the Soviet Union, to justify Richey’s retention. 6. What was his concept of the nature and role of a school of foreign affairs/international relations, and “its relationship to the social sciences generally and other fields of knowledge”? Richey’s views, so far as Gange could tell, were “very general,” and Richey had not “volunteered” [emphasis original] any ideas “as to how we should develop our program.” He found this to be of “considerable importance” to Richey’s value to the program, although, Gange noted, Richey had said that since he agreed with Gange’s plans for the School, he had “seen no need to propose anything different or additional.” All told, Gange wrote, “I have definitely not closed my mind” to giving Richey renewed consideration for promotion at the end of his tenure if he (Richey) took steps to fill in the gaps Gange had noted, but, failing that, he proposed that Richey be offered an acting associate professorship with a one-year tenure and a “clear understanding” that this would end with the 1950–1951 school year, or, alternatively, that Richey be appointed a lecturer on an annually renewable basis to give two courses in the School, leaving open his future status.38 Shortly afterward, on May 9, Gange met with Richey at the Colonnade Club, the university’s faculty club, and spoke to Richey about his decision. He assured Richey that his political views had played no role in this and outlined the options available. After thinking things over, rather than take the acting associate position with an increase of salary for one year, Richey decided to finish out his assistant professorship, which would give him two more years of employment. Richey could not have been happy about these developments, and one can only assume that a residue of anger regarding them underlay his later response to a seemingly trivial event. He had begun giving a series of radio talks dealing with political subjects entitled “In the Public Interest.” They were carried on two stations, WCHV out of Charlottesville and WINC

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in Winchester, and, in keeping with his political views, the talks were extremely conservative and, in keeping with his personality, quite aggressive in tone. For example, in a broadcast commemorating Washington’s birthday, Richey made use of Washington’s “Farewell Address” as a tool for attacking liberals, asking his audience: What did [Washington] conceive the proper function of government to be? To feed the people? To clothe the people? To care for the people as though they were wards of the state? Oh no!!! He went on to predict that should the United States ever come under a dictatorship (“which God forbid”), it would not be by forceful overthrow from without or within, nor would it be American communists who would perform the dark deed—no, it would be those forces who parade themselves as the prophets of a new era, who dress themselves up as the true friends of the people, who promise the people bread and circuses, and who wish to tax the rest of us out of existence to provide bread and circuses and thus to buy votes and keep themselves in power. The villains were those who lulled the public with “the siren and seductive phrases of ‘greater public services for all,’ ‘economic planning to escape the business cycle of boom and bust,’ ‘industrial democracy while still maintain the democratic processes.’” And what would come from this would be “socialist slavery, the regimentation and tyranny of the all powerful state”? Turning to Washington’s foreign policy, Richey spent most of his time simply reading the words of the text itself, with its warnings against foreign entanglements, adding only that, though “Washington never said that it might not be necessary for us at some time to intervene in European affairs to protect American interests,” he “did warn us against . . . turning such intervention into permanent or semi-permanent alliances.”39 In other broadcasts Richey’s topics included attacks on world federalism—popular in some very limited circles at the time—attacks on Harry Truman and Dean Acheson (for proposing to “turn over AMERICAN ATOMIC SECRETS to an INTERNATIONAL ‘Atomic Development Authority’”), and a discussion of how to win the coming World War III (“atomizing Russia from the air is NOT ENOUGH. . . . Any peace in World War II that aims at anything less than the complete subjugation of Russia and the eventual breaking up of Russia . . . WILL BE A BETRAYAL OF AMERICAN BLOOD AND AMERICAN INTERESTS in comparison with which the treason of a Benedict Arnold would appear white”).40. Given the less than measured tone of Richey’s homilies, it is

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not surprising that Gange should have passed him a handwritten note that read: Homer: Thank you for letting me see your radio speech. Since your views differ from those the rest of the staff, I hope it will be made clear in your introduction and in the closing comments by the announcer that you speak only for yourself and not for the WWSFA. John41 This note seems to have been a special source of offense to Richey, who concluded his next broadcast with the following comments: Yes, my friends, there is nothing I like better than a frank and open airing of all matters of public interest. I am most happy that the CIO is having one of its representatives come to talk to you next week at this same time. I hope you will give him the same careful attention you give to me. A full discussion, with ALL sides represented is the way we arrive at truth. Unlike many of my acquaintances, I have no desire to muzzle anybody. In this respect, I believe I am one of the few liberals still extant, one of the genuine rather than the pseudo variety. There’s a big difference, you know. Oh yes, before I forget—The Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs is still quite steamed up lest you think my views are his—beg pardon, I mean its. Anyone who has ever heard the Woodrow Wilson School talk and been able to keep awake that long should be under no delusions whatsoever about my views bearing any similarity to his—beg pardon, I mean its. I would be horribly mortified if any should think I were guilty of peddling that pink’s party line.42 But let me leave this thought with you. Isn’t it EXTRAORDINARY that the Woodrow Wilson School SHOULD HAVE SUCH A SET POINT OF VIEW THAT IT THINKS IT NECESSARY THAT ANY VARIATION THEREFROM SHOULD BE ACCOMPANIED BY A DISCLAIMER? Mark that well, my friends, mark that well!43 Richey had evidently decided to wage full scale war against the School and, in particular, against its director, John Gange, a fact attested to by a document—an aide-memoire—he had sent four days earlier to the governor of the state, John S. Battle, with copies to former governor William M. Tuck (later a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities) and Senator Harry F. Byrd. The 2½-page aide-memoire made significant accusations. Richey told the governor that while the ostensible cause of his “promotion” to a time-limited position was that he had not published and therefore was insignificant in his field, the “REAL REASON FOR THIS ACTION WAS THAT PROF. GANGE WAS SIMPLY

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UNABLE TO STOMACH THE WRITER’S POLITICAL VIEWS.” According to Richey, Gange had established a “party line” (itself a loaded term, used most often in relationship to the Communist Party) that made Gange “to the writer’s mind indistinguishable from that species of being which, by definition, are called ‘socialist.’” He further accused Gange of being an “ardent admirer” of Dean Acheson. Richey also went after Gange’s professional skills, acknowledging that Gange was a “fairly able administrator,” but claiming that Gange lacked the “vision” appropriate to his position; Gange put too much emphasis on the “machinery of foreign policy,” while what the students really needed was the “broad background of ideas which is so necessary if they are to become genuinely responsible citizens.” Colleagues Fernbach and Micaud received their share of attention as well, Fernbach being characterized as “VERY far to the left,” as having been “quite enthusiastic” about the “great experiment within the Soviet Union” as late as 1947, and as having objected strenuously to Richey’s appointment because “it was well known that the writer was anti-Russian.” Micaud was the target of three accusations: first, he was French “by birth and upbringing”; second, he was “frankly socialistic”; and third, for a “long time” he had been “very lenient toward the Soviet Union in his views.” Moreover, Richey went on, the “intellectual attainments of none of these men have been extraordinary.” Fernbach was a “scholar of sorts” but had “severe limitations” with “too little background to orient what he absorbs into a real philosophy of life and human affairs.” Micaud was “probably the best qualified of the lot,” being “capable of original thought” and “occasional flashes of brilliance.” Richey’s own limitations in published material and professional standing were “largely applicable” to the other two who had received promotion. In all this, Richey assured Battle et al., he intended no “special pleading for himself”; his only “genuine and deep concern” was that of an alumnus for his beloved alma mater, and, as Richey nobly expressed it, “THIS REPORT RESULTS FROM A CONSIDERED CONCLUSION THAT ISSUES ARE HERE INVOLVED WHICH TRANSCEND THE WRITER AND HIS PERSONAL FATE [original caps].” However, someone, whomever that might be, was indeed needed to counterbalance the “thinly disguised socialism and milk-and-water internationalism now being peddled by the staff of the School,” to prevent the School from becoming a “sort of Front Populaire” and to safeguard the welfare of the University of Virginia and the “future of the leaders of this nation” who might issue from it.44 We only have one response from the three recipients, a cautious one from William M. Tuck, at this time between elected positions and working as an attorney in South Boston, Virginia. Apparently Tuck and Richey were acquainted, for Tuck’s letter begins “Dear Homer,” and goes on to

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express alarm regarding a “shocking situation” if the “statements made in your letter can be substantiated and are true.” Tuck, though believing in “freedom of thought and expression,” draws the line at socialists and communists as “enemies to our American way of life” and urges Richey to take the matter up with President Darden.45 Richey wrote back to “Dear Bill,” assuring him that the accusations were true and could be “largely substantiated.” As an example, he adduced the note from Gange that had included the observation that Richey’s views differed from those of the other staff members. This was not the time to go to Darden, Richey wrote, because, first of all, Gange was currently one of Darden’s “fair haired boys,” and second, because Richey himself had “irked Darden considerably” by standing up for a student who was to be expelled for misconduct. He does not provide the relevant details, and they are not otherwise available.46 However, Richey changed his mind and two days later sent a copy of his aide-memoire to Darden, offering at the same time to send along the letter from Tuck. Meanwhile Gange, having heard Richey’s last broadcast, was understandably angry about it and wrote Richey a long, three-page, singlespaced letter with a copy sent to Darden to “put on the record” his response to Richey’s “unwarranted and underhanded attack” on the Woodrow Wilson School. The letter makes it clear that the two men had already had extensive discussions regarding Richey’s status, and one senses from the language that the tone of these discussions had been less than friendly. The depth of Gange’s anger over the broadcast’s closing paragraphs emerges when he writes: I wasn’t particularly surprised that you should vent such bitterness as your remarks and the tone of your voice revealed but I was deeply disappointed to see you involve the whole of this School and the University in what is actually nothing more than your almost pathological resentment toward me. He goes on to remind Richey that his (Gange’s) recommendations had been based on professional criteria and also that the final decision in the matter had lain with and was made by the president and the university’s governing board, the Board of Visitors.47 Gange continued: You and I have had long talks about this whole matter and I am satisfied that you are determined not to face the facts for you have done nothing in the past ten months, which would be considered in the academic world as having enhanced your fitness or status as a university professor . . . I am fully prepared to hear you continue in your veiled or open attacks upon me on the radio, in the press, in your classes and in the community in the same way that numerous previous

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After urging Richey to at least keep his attacks personal to Gange and not to include the entire School, Gange refers to that place in the broadcast where Richey “spoke very darkly of attempts to ‘muzzle’” him (Richey). Gange writes that neither he nor anyone else had made any such attempt, nor would he, since he believed that any attempt to muzzle a “demagogue” would only succeed in making a martyr of him and Gange hadn’t the “slightest desire to contribute to your self-concocted martyrdom.” Indeed, Gange writes, it was President Darden who had asked that Richey’s broadcasts be identified as expressing his personal views, and, moreover, the phrase “the views expressed by Mr. Richey are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this station or the University of Virginia” was a stock phrase, and “only a person with a hyper-martyrdom complex could believe he was being muzzled by it.” In addition, the radio station, WCHV, was also included in the disclaimer that gave protection from “any libelous or slanderous” remarks Richey might have made in his “emotional outbursts against the world and practically everybody in it.” To Gange, the lowest point in the broadcast was Richey’s resort to the “now-common smear tactic” of alleging that the teaching staff of the Woodrow Wilson School was “pink”; Gange expressed his expectation that Richey would now “proceed promptly” to offer evidence or else proffer a public apology to the staff of the School. Gange professed amusement at “how utterly unconcerned” Richey was about facts; given that three of the staff were refugees from communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, and China supported by the National Committee for Free Europe—“that hot bed of Communists like Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Lucius Clay, Messrs. Joseph Grew, Allen W. Dulles, et al”—and that Gange himself had been “completely ‘cleared’” by the FBI three times for responsible work in government, the charges of disloyalty were preposterous.48 Now that he and Gange had become declared enemies, Richey’s response was to try to outflank his opponent by sending President Darden a document laying out the dangers he saw for the Woodrow Wilson School under Gange’s leadership. He also sent a copy to Governor Battle. He began with the least controversial of his concerns, objections that currently offered classes put too much emphasis on the machinery of international politics while putting too little on the “underlying philosophy” (for example, the idea of “world union” that he saw to be latent in the United Nations), and the uselessness in his eyes of offerings such as “Colonial Problems in International Relations” or a course offered by one of Richey’s special bêtes noires, Fernbach, on “The Development of Undeveloped Areas.” These courses gave the “more astute” reader of the university’s catalogue the impression of “padding,” and, Richey writes, the first was open to suspicion of being a vehicle for “special pleading” for the European Recovery

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Plan (Marshall Plan), and the second was almost certainly intended as a vehicle of support for Truman’s Point Four program.49 Now in his letter, Richey begins a gradual approach toward his upcoming attack on Gange. He writes that the “great and crying need of the School . . . is for more emphasis on AMERICAN POLICIES” and that meeting this need will also require courses on US domestic politics and how they affect foreign policy—the only courses in the school that currently fulfilled this function were Richey’s own, although [i]t is known to the writer that Prof. Gange occasionally descends from the ethereal sphere of higher international politics to more mundane domestic questions. One such occasion was during a lecture he gave in Foreign Affairs 2 last Spring, when he admonished the students that unless they supported FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Law)50 they would only have themselves to blame if war should come. With regard to this alleged incident (as we shall see, Gange will characterize Richey’s depiction as a gross distortion), Richey objects to the “questionable propaganda involved in indulging in special pleading for a law which has as its primary intent the SUPPRESSION rather than the PROTECTION of human freedom, in this case the freedom to hire and fire WHOM ONE PLEASES.” Finally, Richey gets to his actual point. After a formidable windup, a paragraph in which he urges at length that momentous issues are at stake, issues that “transcend any personal squabbles or animosity,” “matters of principle” that involve “the national well being of a great country and a great people,” Richey delivers his pitch: The writer herewith ASSERTS and REAFFIRMS what he has said on many occasions and to many people, both privately and publicly, that the complexion of the School is DEFINITELY PINK if not a DARK HUED RED. The next ten paragraphs constitute an all-out assault on Gange, the burden of which is summed up in the sentence “John Gange, though professing a middle-of-the-road point of view in politics, is a SOCIALIST.” The evidence? A claim that Gange in “unguarded moments” had advocated “public ownership of property,” that in international politics “he parrots whatever the State department happens to be thinking at any given time,” that he had been heard to defend Alger Hiss, that he had opened a class with the remark (which even Richey concedes to have been facetious) “All right, gentlemen, we’ll begin the indoctrination [emphasis original].” Taking up more space than the political accusations are the personal ones: Gange is too “little” for the job, lacks the “capacity for really independent thought” or the capacity to “be more than a ‘yes man,’” is cynical “about

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matters of great public concern,” gives exams that “take a far longer period to finish than the three hours allotted,” and is a “mediocre” public speaker. The upshot of all this? “The writer’s conclusion is that the $7500 per year salary which Mr. Gange draws from the University of Virginia is a waste of money.” The only positive points that Richey will allow Gange involve his success in “obtaining money for fellowships, attempting to build up the staff numerically, obtaining speakers of some prominence and distinction to speak before the students . . . giving the School proper publicity, etc.” Having dispatched Gange, Richey turns to his other colleagues, Micaud, and Fernbach. Micaud, though in possession of “a good mind” and a “pleasant personality,” is also a socialist and has “unsound ideas about education generally,” attaching undue importance to matters such as cultural anthropology and social psychology, “sciences” that are “frowned upon in the most intelligent academic circles.” Still, Richey finds that while the “average undergraduate mind” cannot get much from him, the “exceptional student” can, with the result that Micaud “has a contribution to make” to the School. Fernbach, on the other hand, should be cast off. He is “underhanded and scheming,” having tried to “cut the writer’s throat from behind” and being a socialist to boot. Moreover, though he is a “hard worker,” he “overburdens” his students with reading, is “pedantic” and “pettily authoritative,” and “lacks the depth of insight and vision which a University teacher ought to have.” Finally, Richey has recommendations to make: retain Micaud, but examine any policy suggestions from him “most warily”; remove Gange as Director of the School and find a new one; and given that Gange and Fernbach had tenure, allow them to “wither on the vine,” and make sure that someone with “political convictions similar enough to the writer’s to provide a counterbalance to the present left-wing, socialistic composition of the School” be retained.51 Upon receipt of this extraordinary document, Darden replied politely but pointedly. He noted first of all that he could see nothing in the note that Gange had written regarding the broadcast disclaimer “which should have occasioned any ill will on your part”; indeed, he told Richey, Gange had consulted with Darden before sending the note, and Darden had explicitly approved his action, saying that there is “no personal criticisms of you, either direct or implied” in what was “simply a statement of fact.” Darden went on to emphasize that while Richey did indeed speak as a professor of the Woodrow Wilson School it was not possible, either for him or for anyone else, to speak for a school or a university “wherein are found such varying shades of opinion on a matter of such importance” as US foreign policy. For example, he tells Richey: [w]hile I have no objection to the emphasis which you place upon a Pax Americana, to use our own expression, or upon the use of

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military force by the United States to achieve the objects which you deem desirable, I do not find myself in accord with your views and, because of this, I would not want you to speak for me. I do not believe peace can rest for long on force alone. It seems to me that you advocate a course which is hostile to any form of international organization for the preservation of peace. If I have correctly appraised your views, I am wholeheartedly opposed to them. Then Darden turns to Richey’s political accusations, telling Richey that the memorandum to Governor Battle is the first he (Darden) had heard of these “serious charges” and that he was “somewhat puzzled” by the fact that this had been referred to two governors and a senator “without ever having mentioned them to those of us charged with the direction of the University’s affairs.” Darden had “no information from any other source which tends to confirm” the charges, and though he had talked to Richey “a number of times about the Woodrow Wilson School and your position in the university,” the matter had never been brought up. Nor had it been discussed with the dean of the university, Dr. Ivey Lewis.52 One suspects, though it is impossible to know, that Richey understood what any reasonable person would have understood from this letter, i.e., that his appeal to the president had, at the very least, not helped his cause. One suspects this because at this point Richey altered his tactics somewhat, sending a note to Darden in which he requested a copy of the original recommendations made by Gange the previous spring; he made this request, he explained, because he had reason to believe that in that report Gange had lied about Richey, making a false statement “willfully and maliciously with the intent to cause injury to me and my professional career.”53 Darden wrote back, inviting Richey to see the portion of the report dealing with Richey, and noting not only that he did “not find anything in it calculated to do [Richey] injury” but that Gange’s observations, in fact, seemed “quite friendly.”54 Richey, in a lengthy missive, responded that having looked at the document in question, he believed Darden to be mistaken. Richey repeated his assertion of a deliberate falsehood, saying that there were “certain things in the background” of which Darden had no knowledge and which time and space did not allow Richey to detail at the present time. What the present time and space did allow Richey to do was to lay out a theory concerning a conspiracy directed at himself. He began by admiring Gange’s slyness in first easing him out with a temporary promotion and then by damning him with faint praise. However, Richey had now become fully aware of the depth of Gange’s game; the “pieces of the jig saw puzzle” had fallen into place, and Richey now realized that “the decision to get rid of me had largely germinated if not come to full fruition in Mr. Gange’s mind over a month before he took over his duties at the Woodrow Wilson School.” The revealing detail in

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the report was that place where Gange was noting that Richey had no published research other than some letters and verse that had been published in local newspapers. On consideration Richey remembered that the only verse he had ever had printed was “some doggerel which appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch on July 20, 1949 during the Battle-Miller gubernatorial campaign.” Along with that he had written letters in support of Battle and against his opponent. Conspiracies are clothed in darkness, and so Richey is forced to do a good deal of supposition. He remembers that toward the end of July 1949, after his verse had been published (a point that Richey emphasizes), Gange had come to Charlottesville for a weekend, and though it “would have been normal” for Gange to get in touch with the members of the committee that had appointed him, he did not. What did he do? He went “into a huddle with Assistant Professor Fernbach, who, as is well known, was Homer Richey’s worst enemy on the University faculty.” There is no doubt but that the clippings containing my verse and other letters were laid before Mr. Gange by Mr. Fernbach at that time and “put on ice” for future reference. In other words, the business of gathering ammunition to be used against Richey began as of that meeting in late July of 1949, well over a month before Mr. Gange put in his permanent appearance on the scene of action. . . . To be sure, I have no way of knowing definitely what took place at the GangeFernbach huddle, but the evidence is pretty strong in support of the correctness of my assumptions. In support of his theory, Richey makes the claim that Fernbach was known to have been an “ardent, though unobtrusive supporter” of Miller against Battle. Richey finds support for his belief that the pro-Battle stance “rankled in Mr. Gange’s mind” by a separate circumstance that Richey finds to be logically, though not directly, connected: Richey had taken a day away from the university—after making “adequate provision” for his two classes to be taught by one of the teaching fellows of the School—to campaign for Willis Smith against liberal Frank Graham for the Senate.55 Gange had remarked to Richey that he hoped that Richey’s efforts would end in failure, for “[i]f Graham should be defeated, I think it would be a national disaster.” Richey finds this especially revealing in light of what he asserts to be the fact of Graham’s membership in an “exceedingly long” list of communist front organizations. The logic then is as follows: Fernbach supported liberal Miller and “huddled” with Gange, who supported liberal Graham, and they plotted together to rob Richey of his job because he opposed their candidates and favored conservatives.56 From here Richey turns to Gange’s assessment of Richey’s experience in the 1950 recommendation, charging that Gange misrepresented the work Richey had done and “constantly overemphasized my weak points and

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played down my strong points.” Before the war, Richey writes, he had spent three years abroad plus three summers in Germany (his years of academic study), years of experience of which Gange had made no mention at all. Then during the war and in its aftermath, Richey had held positions of responsibility on the “highest echelons of military government” as first Executive Officer of the Interior Division of the Old German Country Unit and as aide-de-camp to Lucius Clay’s predecessor, Brigadier General C. W. Wickersham, in charge of organizing American military government for Germany. His services were then requested, he continues, to teach and lecture on German politics and history at the Disarmament School in London, and so he went there on detached service, receiving “high commendation” from the school commandant. Richey’s file contains several letters of recommendation from officers under whom he served, all of them expressing high praise for his work. Regarding his supposed lack of knowledge of international economics, Richey claimed that his knowledge was “about as extensive” as Gange’s and that he had a better grasp inasmuch as he understood, unlike Gange, that “a huge national debt and continued deficit spending leads along a straight path to national bankruptcy.”57 Finally, Richey closed by claiming that Gange had played down “almost completely” his “strongest point,” i.e., “the fact that many students believe my courses to be the most stimulating of any in the Woodrow Wilson School.” With regard to this he reminded Darden of the “attempt of certain of my enemies in the University to poison your mind against me back in 1948 by spreading the rumor that my qualities as a teacher left something to be desired” and reminded him also of the student letters of support from the “best students in the School” that had contradicted this rumor. Having closed, Richey remembered an added circumstance he wished to address: Gange had criticized him for not offering suggestions regarding possible improvements to the School on the basis that he, Richey, regarded himself as being in entire accord with Gange’s plans and actions. Richey claimed that the circumstance was that in conversation Gange had just stated that he was running things and that anyone who didn’t fit in with his ideas would have to take the consequences. He then turned to me and said: “You don’t object to the way I’m running things, do you, Homer?” Naturally my answer was “no” to a question put to me in that form.58 Richey had said early in the letter to Darden that Gange was trying to do a “hatchet job,” and it seems that Richey was then inspired to do a little hatcheting of his own, writing the first of three more letters attempting to find incriminating evidence regarding Gange’s politics. His first appeal was to Joseph P. Kamp. Kamp was the editor of a periodic pamphlet,

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“Headlines and What’s Behind Them,” and author of Strikes and the Communists Behind Them, a man who in 1952 would be singled out by Time Magazine, itself no bastion of liberalism, in an article entitled “They Hate Ike” as smearing Eisenhower with a headline reading “REDS, NEW DEALERS USE IKE IN PLOT TO HOLD POWER.” As Time put it: Behind Headlines is pince-nezed Joseph P. Kamp, who edited the Awakener—well-loved by the Nazis—from 1932 until its death in 1936. In 1944 he was cited for contempt of Congress and sentenced (in 1949) to four months in prison. Kamp’s touch is far from subtle: he fans anti-Semitic feelings by picturing prominent Jews who are supporting Ike.59 Richey’s letter to Kamp is not in the University of Virginia’s files, but Kamp’s reply—letting Richey know that he had checked his files and failed to find anything on Gange—is.60 Also in Richey’s papers is a letter dated March 15, 1951, addressed to Representative Richard Vail (R-IL), a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, from Paul F. Kinnucan, a once and future resident of Illinois who was at that time a student of Richey’s, who had written a strong letter of support for him, and who would later testify on his behalf. This letter characterizes Gange as an “out-and-out international socialist bent on the subordination of the United State to world total-Rule by the New York-Washington-London ‘acceptable ones,’” as a man who, though he “poses as an educator,” is “really preoccupied with conducting a propagandistic indoctrination program.” What marks this letter as almost certainly emanating from Richey himself is a strange reference in the middle of it to Gange being a “past-master at the well-known bureaucratic art of damning by faint praise,” the exact accusation made by Richey earlier and relevant to Richey’s situation but surely not to Kinnucan’s. In any case, Kinnucan goes on to tell Vail, “I think Mr. Gange has something of the Alger Hiss about him” and to request that Vail check into him. He then opens a line of questioning that we will see appearing in Richey’s thinking from this time forward, suggesting to Vail that “[e]xactly why [Gange] left the Department of State in 1947 might prove to be interesting.”61 Meanwhile, the nature of Richey’s charges and the public manner in which he was making them forced the university to take action, and on April 14 Richey received a letter from the dean of the college, Ivey F. Lewis, informing him that a group of professors that was constituted as the Committee on Foreign Affairs was “studying the situation” in the Woodrow Wilson School and requesting Richey to make a more specific statement of charges that he believed to require investigation. Lewis emphasized that while the professors expected a “great variation of opinions,” what they were, in fact, looking for were “matters of fact.”62

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In his response four days later, Richey was uncharacteristically brief. He laid out a list of seven points that he felt to be at issue: 1. Gange was trying to “ease” him from his position because of his political views, thus violating the principle of academic freedom. 2. The Woodrow Wilson School was “left-wing, in fact, pink.” 3. Gange was “unfit by character to be head of the Woodrow Wilson School or even to be a member of the University faculty.” 4. Gange’s background and training were inadequate for his position. 5. The present course structure of the school tended toward its degeneration into “something like a glorified course in current events.” 6. The present tendency of the School was to “indoctrinate rather than educate.” 7. Of the original staff of the School, he, Richey, was the “only Virginian and alumnus of the University of Virginia,” yet he had been passed over in favor of a “Third Force French Socialist” and a “late friend of the Soviet Union.” Furthermore, Gange had denigrated him, Richey, by referring in his original report to Richey’s Americanism in quotes.63 It was right during this period also that Richey’s letters to The Cavalier Daily began to appear. In addition to the student responses that quickly appeared, we find a letter to President Darden from John Tritz, a student in the Woodrow Wilson School, who expressed his concern regarding the effect Richey was having on public perceptions of the School: I do not pretend that Mr. Richey is not entitled to his opinions, prejudiced or not, but if he cares to make them public, they should, at least, be based on solid grounds and be reasonable. For people connected with the School, it is easy to find that such bases do not exist, but, unfortunately, for the University at large and the community the problem may not be as simple. And Tritz went to express his hope that steps were being taken to “correct the false impressions created.”64 Darden responded to Tritz, informing him that Richey’s charges were being investigated but that the university was making no efforts “to interfere his expression of opinion.” However, should Tritz choose, there was “no reason why you should not address a letter to The Cavalier Daily” on the matter.65 According to his own account, Richey was not notified about the inquiry by the group of professors at the time of its inception and found out about it from “unofficial sources.” Then he discovered that it was “common knowledge among the clerical help at the Woodrow Wilson School” and that he was “the only one left in ignorance.”66 He came to the conclusion that this would be a kangaroo court and decided to take

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matters into his own hands by addressing a petition to the Board of Visitors, the highest governing body of the university. In his petition, submitted to the Board of Visitors on April 25, he explained that he was referring matters to the Board of Visitors because his petition dealt with matters that were beyond the official competence of a faculty committee. He then proceeded to the, by now, familiar charges, i.e., that Gange was seeking to oust Richey because of his political views, that he had done this because he, Gange, as well as Micaud and Fernbach were “left-wing, in fact pink,” and that in Gange’s 1950 report he had lied about Richey. For these reasons, he “respectfully urged” that Gange be “REMOVED FOR CAUSE FROM HIS POSITION AS DIRECTOR OF THE Woodrow Wilson School AND FROM THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY, the cause being that he lacks integrity and common honesty.” Richey then went on to urge his own claims to preferment as superior to those of Fernbach and Micaud based on his being the only Virginian and alumnus of the university and founded on a claim of seniority based on the facts that Richey had been the first appointed and had originally been hired at a higher rate of pay than the others. These points were accompanied by the accusations of socialism and pro-Soviet views that we have already seen. Furthermore, Richey continued, in making his recommendations, Gange had completely disregarded the “fact that in the opinion of the best students in the School, the writer’s courses were not only superior to those of his two colleagues, but were regarded by many students as being the best courses in the University.” Gange had given the other men preference based on “such externalities as the fact that they had gone to a few more political science conferences than the writer.” Richey went on to urge that since he had been “unjustly, unfairly and arbitrarily discriminated against,” and in recognition of his “superior instruction and the extraordinary service the writer has rendered the School and the University” including his radio broadcasts whereby he “has done more to put the Woodrow Wilson School on the map than all the efforts of Professors Gange, Fernbach and Micaud combined,” he, Homer G. Richey, should be made a full professor in the Woodrow Wilson School. He urged the Board of Visitors that this represented a “unique opportunity” to take a “pioneer step towards turning the tide of subversive teaching and red infiltration into American institutions of higher learning.”67 If, by any chance, anyone regarded the writing of this document as an act of breathtaking effrontery and impudence, there is no indication of it in the existing documents. It was during this period, April 28 through May 4, that the Cerebrus interchanges were taking place, including the threatened lawsuit. And it was just afterward, on May 8, that the first stage of resolution was reached as the Committee on Foreign Affairs submitted its report. The Committee had examined the documents we have been discussing, including the student letters in The Cavalier Daily but

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omitting the petition to the Board of Visitors, and had met seven times, meeting with Richey on April 30 and Gange on May 6. The report noted the unfortunate circumstance that neither Fernbach nor Micaud had been available, both being absent on leave, and stipulated that for this reason the report must be considered tentative. Noting that Gange had been hired with the understanding that he would have a free hand in making staffing decisions, the Committee dealt one by one with the seven points Richey had made in his summation of charges to them. Gange had been “questioned closely” on his grounds for not recommending Richey for tenure and had told the committee that “a man who did not have adequate training for teaching in international affairs and who had no published research and whose experience as a practitioner in the field was sharply limited, should not be promoted to a position of associate professor.” Insofar as Gange had referred to Richey’s political views in the report, it was done to illustrate the point that, as far as Richey had a reputation, it was not a reputation as a scholar but as a person who had made public pronouncements of his personal political views. Nor did Gange see Richey’s views in themselves as problematic but only the “inordinate amount of classroom time” spent expressing them. Richey himself had urged his retention on the grounds that the School required a counterbalancing point of view, but the Committee found that “[i]t is clear that the expression of political views cannot be allowed to become a guarantee of academic preferment.” Overall, the Committee found that Richey’s charge that he was discriminated against because of his political positions was unfounded. Regarding Richey’s charge that the teaching in the Woodrow Wilson School other than his own was “pink,” the Committee stated that it had made a study of the content of the courses, the nature of the examinations and comprehensive examinations, the reading list of required and recommended books and articles and the list of visiting speakers and finds the evidence available does not support this charge. The Committee went on to address Richey’s charges against Gange’s character, writing that discussions with Richey had pinpointed three points that were at issue: 1. Richey charged that when Gange had spoken to Richey about not promoting him, Gange had said that it was not on the basis of Richey’s political views, yet in his report Richey’s political views were given as a reason for not recommending his promotion.68 However, Gange had told the Committee that Richey’s political views were not the issue but the inordinate use of class time to emphasize those views and that, in any case, this, as stated earlier, was not the decisive issue in Gange’s decision.

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2. Richey charged that Gange had stated in conversation with Richey that he did not see Richey as an isolationist, but that in the report he had called Richey an isolationist. Gange told the Committee that he had at best a vague memory of the conversation in question but that he imagined he had meant that “in advocating an attack on Russia,” Richey could not be called an isolationist, but that in opposing virtually all the mechanisms of international cooperation of the postwar era, he could. 3. Richey charged that Gange had falsely told the owner of WCHV, Charles Barham, that Richey was antisocial and had declined invitations to visit Gange’s house. Gange explained that he had told Barham only that it was difficult to reach Richey because he had no telephone and that this “interfered with his normal participation in social affairs of the school.” The Committee found this to be “obviously a misunderstanding of the sort that commonly occurs in conversations.” All told, the Committee found the charge against Gange’s character not to be sustained. Regarding Richey’s assertion that Gange was not professionally qualified for his position, the Committee merely noted that “[t]his matter has been thoroughly studied and passed upon by a competent committee [the search committee composed of the three former acting heads of the Woodrow Wilson School—Dillard, Gooch, and Hale], by the President of the University, and by the BoV.” Regarding Richey’s charge regarding left-wing indoctrination of students by his colleagues, the Committee found that though the faculty of the Woodrow Wilson School was itself too small to encompass all points of view, the extensive list of visiting speakers ensured an adequate amount of diversity for the students and found that “Conservative and Liberal positions are presented by leading students in the two groups with full opportunity for questions and discussion.” Regarding Richey’s last point, his own superiority to Fernbach and Micaud with his emphasis on his own native Virginianism, the Committee found this contention to be “an unworthy appeal to provincialism and prejudice” and insisted that the “Chairman of a School must be trusted to make his selections and recommendations on the basis of professional competence and promise of usefulness to the School.”69 This report, which Richey would have a good deal to say about—none of it complimentary—was, by now, perhaps influential but otherwise beside the point since the matter had passed to a higher body, the Board of Visitors, which met on May 11 to hear testimony from Richey. The Rector, Barron F. Black, was unable to attend, and so Christopher B. Garnett was elected Rector pro tempore. Also attending were President Colgate W. Darden, Jr., of the University of Virginia; Dr. M. L. Combs, president

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of Mary Washington College; and Visitors Gay, Gravatt, Mears, Smith, Wailes, and Willis.70 Richey began to read a letter from the governor, John S. Battle, in praise of Richey’s broadcasts, but Garnett interrupted him, asking what his purpose was in appearing before the Board. Richey replied that he had come in support of his petition, which made two requests: (1) his own promotion to a full professorship, and (2) the removal of John Gange from his position as Director of the Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs. He went on to recount the circumstances of his hiring, noting that when he started at the Woodrow Wilson School, he had found the school being operated by a committee of five, three of whom (one of these being his present colleague Fernbach) had opposed his appointment. And Richey testified that “[b]y hearsay” he had learned that Fernbach had stated that Richey was too “anti-Russian.” Richey then went on to recount a very early controversy that had marked his time at the School. In the fall of 1946 the Extension Division had organized a series of lectures on atomic energy, and Richey was asked to serve on a panel that also included Fernbach, Micaud, plus two atomic scientists from Oak Ridge.71 In Richey’s account, after several meetings he was asked to withdraw because he “would not plug for” international control of atomic energy. Richey then reiterated his already familiar statements regarding Fernbach and Micaud’s political views, adding that Micaud had stated in class that he was a socialist. Gay asked Richey if Micaud had ever advocated socialism, to which Richey replied that though he did not know if Micaud had ever advocated a socialist government for the United States, he had advocated one for France. Fernbach, according to Richey, was cagier in expressing his political views: in 1947 he had advocated “close friendship” with the Soviet Union, but since then he had “shifted with the political winds.” However, as recently as early 1950, he had favored the recognition of communist China. Then, to back up his point Richey presented the Committee with a reading list Fernbach had used in a course dealing with the Far East, pointing out that among the items on the list were books authored by alleged communists Owen Lattimore and John K. Fairbank.72 Richey also told the Board that he wanted to bring a student to testify that Gange and Fernbach were “socialistic” in their beliefs.73 Meanwhile, Richey’s radio broadcasts continued. On May 15 he gave a broadcast that dealt just slightly obliquely with his own situation, discussing the “heavy infiltration of pinks and reds into our institutions of higher learning” and the accompanying loss of academic freedom for the “good American whose loyalty to his own country and her institutions was unquestioned.” Most of the broadcast comprised quotations from other writers, one of the most interesting being from John T. Flynn’s The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution.74 The passage Richey read laid out the danger in the university classroom that came, not so much from the out-and-out communist teacher but even more from the socialist

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who can accomplish the same evil ends of undermining American institutions as a communist but with more safety because “we have given him a coat of approval as an anti-Communist.” The approach of the socialist is twofold: first is the “incessant ATTACK UPON THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF THE AMERICAN SYSTEM, in order to break down the faith of students in our institutions;” and the second is to promote, not an entire system of socialism, but, more slyly, “some specific policy which will have the effect of advancing their Socialist dream.” Flynn goes on to argue that “[n]o one of these alone would amount to socialism. But all of them together do make a Socialist State.”75 Richey’s broadcast of May 22 related more directly to the matters at hand. That evening he undertook to explain to a public apparently already familiar with the Cerebrus controversy just what he had had in mind in starting a lawsuit against the editorial staff of The Cavalier Daily, and he elaborated on his suspicions of a conspiracy that inspired the lawsuit. He told his listeners that his purpose in initiating the lawsuit was to discover the real author of the letter, that in less than a week after the letter’s publication he had discovered Cerebrus’s true identity, and that therefore the necessity of bringing suit against the “little boys on The Cavalier Daily was thereby obviated.” He went on to excuse himself for his actions; he was “not in the habit of bringing lawsuits against children,” but he had “good reason” to believe that the letter “if not written, was inspired by a member of the Faculty of the University of Virginia,” and, therefore, Richey’s object had been “to ferret out the name of a man who would stoop to hiding behind the coattails of students.” We have already seen that Richey considered the mangling of people’s names to be an effective means of denigration, so now he made an offer to “Buster—beg pardon, I mean CerebrusTER”; he went on to offer Cerebrus $10 if he sent Richey by midnight of the next night an affidavit, signed and sworn to before a notary public, affirming that the student was the sole author of the Cerebrus letter. Also, he wanted the name and date of the magazine carrying the story (the presumption here is that Richey did not get The New Yorker and did not believe that the story had originated in a magazine). From here he turns to the “little boys of the ROSENKAVALIER Daily,” professing to “admire their spunk” but deploring their “irresponsible journalism.” And then he admonishes his listeners not to lose sight of the main issue, i.e., “the infiltration of reds, pinks and subversives into our colleges and universities.” He repeats his descriptions of his unnamed colleagues from his earlier letters to The Cavalier Daily and emphasizes that he “did not invent these lovely characters,” that they were real people now engaged in instructing the youth of the land in how to grow up to be good Fair Dealers, in how to become global spenders, in short, in how to toss away your and my hard-earned tax dollars on every

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crackpot scheme that now exists, or, if we don’t have enough such schemes already, then how to invent some more. He goes on to exhort his audience to beware: It is your sons who are being fed on the pap that America ought to toss her sovereign independence onto some common stockpile, who are being brought up on this milk-sop internationalism which is so popular among academic circles. It is your sons who are being fed semi-treasonous doctrine, who have been fed this doctrine for so long that they are no longer able, most of them, to discern it as treasonous.76 And so it goes on. The Cavalier Daily reported this broadcast and told its readers that it had contacted Cerebrus (who was now identified as a third-year law student).77 Cerebrus told the newspaper that he had no interest in Richey’s $10; he added that his second letter to the newspaper had given the denial of conspiracy that Richey required and that the only bit missing was the identification of the Mary McCarthy story in the February 3 edition of The New Yorker as the source for the story, an identification that Cerebrus now made. Meanwhile Richey had busied himself writing a response to the report of the Committee of Foreign Affairs, a report that “this writer” found to be “most extraordinary.” The burden of the ten-page document rests on his response to Gange’s dismissal of Richey’s qualifications, an issue Richey attacks by comparing his own record to Gange’s. He finds himself in possession of a superior education, with his own doctorate (in philosophy) overshadowing Gange’s mere master’s degree. He goes on to point out that neither of them had any publications, and here he makes what is, from a scholarly point of view, an astonishing statement in what he imagines to be justification of himself: he writes that he “has not remained indifferent to the question of writing for publication”; in fact, he has a “cabinet full” of as yet unpublished articles. However, [p]erhaps one reason he has not been more successful in selling his articles was that he never bothered with the so-called “learned” periodicals, but was shooting for bigger game, most of his articles having been submitted to such magazines as “The Saturday Evening Post,” “Reader’s Digest,” “American Mercury,” etc., etc. From the reference to “selling” articles to the disdain for “learned” periodicals to the elevation of the Reader’s Digest to the status of “bigger game,” this paragraph shows that, Ph. D. notwithstanding, Richey had absolutely no understanding of the scholarly world, a world to which

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he claimed to be entitled to membership with the exalted status of a full professorship. In any case, Richey goes on to compare his experience with Gange’s and, not surprisingly, finds himself the winner, having lived abroad, while Gange had only made trips. Gange’s experiences as Executive Secretary of the Central Secretariat of the Economic Cooperation Administration, as Assistant Chief of the Caribbean Office, as Executive Secretary of the United States Section, Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, and as the Acting Executive Secretary of the Central Secretariat, Department of State, are dismissed as merely the view of the world from the “Washington bureaucratic cubby hole perspective.” One has to wonder at this point (if not far earlier) what Richey was thinking; by dismissing Gange’s qualifications for the job, Richey was insulting the people who had considered those qualifications to be adequate, i.e., the people who were currently judging his own case. Did he genuinely seek to persuade with these statements, or had he given up hope and simply given himself over to trying to elevate his case into a cause célèbre that might bring a knight on a white horse in the form of the conservative governor, John S. Battle, Senator Harry Byrd, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or perhaps Senator Joe McCarthy himself riding to the rescue? In any case, Richey seized the opportunity to further smear Gange, insinuating that he was a coward because in 1941 he “chose to seek safe haven from the draft in the State Department,” moving there “SIX days after Pearl Harbor,” emphasizing that Gange had spent time in the Caribbean Office, which was in the Division of American Republics Affairs, which in turn was headed by Laurence Duggan, accused (and actual) spy for the Soviet Union.78 The Board of Visitors met again on June 7, and once again Richey appeared before them. He objected to Gange’s charge that he (Richey) had devoted too much class time to the exposition of his own political views, saying that Gange had never attended any of Richey’s lectures in his advanced classes, though he had been invited to do so. It later emerged that Gange had, in fact, attended some of Richey’s lectures in the basic courses, Foreign Affairs 1–2, but Richey, without specifying his reasoning, discounted the notion that Gange could have formed his impression on this point from those experiences. One point to which Richey returned and which must be mentioned because, as he said himself, it “rankled” him was that in the 1950 recommendation Gange had put Richey’s “Americanism” in quotation marks; Richey found this to be deeply significant and testified that “I believe that was the reason for my removal.” However, a look at some of Gange’s writings discovers a number of similar uses of quotation marks in contexts that indicate that he did not use them as a slur but rather as a shortcut to indicate a range of views. Later in the meeting Richey was asked about the status of his lawsuit against The Cavalier Daily. Here he finally acknowledged what he had

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implied all along, i.e., that he believed that John Gange had written the Cerebrus letter and was “hiding behind a student” and that Richey had hoped to “smoke him out.” Richey then asked the Board for its permission to bring in several students from the Woodrow Wilson School as witnesses. Hugh Fagan was a 26-year-old veteran Phi Beta Kappa student about to receive a BA in Economics. He testified that he had found Richey’s classes to be “extremely interesting,” tempering, but not destroying, Fagan’s own liberalism; also, that Richey had not spent an “inordinate amount of time” in class putting across his political views. He further testified that Richey’s knowledge of economics was adequate. Richard Jones, also Phi Beta Kappa, testified that among the other members of the faculty there was “too much of a tendency to get only one side of an argument.” The Rector, Black, interjected a question, asking, “Is there anything communistic in the teaching of the other members of the Woodrow Wilson School,” drawing the answer “No. Only a lack of awareness of what is happening in foreign affairs.” Douglas Hinkle, a foreign affairs major, also a veteran with a B+ average, testified that while he did “not agree with everything” Richey said, his expressed differences had not affected his grades. He noted that “[s]ome of the students in the class have taken violent exception to Mr. Richey’s statements. Likewise, Mr. Richey has taken violent exception to some of the statements made by students.” When asked about Gange’s views on the FEPC (obviously more of a hot-button issue in the South than elsewhere, though controversial enough everywhere in the 1950s), Hinkle testified that “Mr. Gange in a lecture stated that most of the people in the world are colored and are watching the treatment of Negroes in the United States. Hence, it is important for us to treat Negroes properly.” And Hinkle finished by saying that his rating in order of the School’s four professors was Richey, Micaud, Fernbach, Gange. John M. Pifer, a veteran working on a master’s degree, was the first student to identify himself as a Republican with political opinions in keeping with Richey’s. He testified that another student, Bob Shea, had warned that Richey “should give up Americans for Free Enterprise [see preceding text] or Gange would oust” him. He also claimed that in his other classes only “one point of view” had been taught and that one of his courses “emphasized socialism.” He went to say that Richey “lets ideas stand on their own. Mr. Richey has consistently questioned the Point IV program. Every other professor accepts Point IV as being the only course.” When questioned further by Richey as to his (Richey’s) competence in international economics Pifer gave the following answer: This is my minor for my degree. The textbook explanation is not logical. Mr. Richey says that politics are foremost and economic theory secondary. Mr. Richey’s ideas have proved to be valid.

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This seems an odd answer, given that it establishes two points, neither of them, on the face of it at least, helpful to Richey (though meant to be), first, that Richey—not an economist himself though claiming competence in the area—is in opposition to “the textbook explanation,” and second, that Richey has been teaching that economic theory is secondary to politics. Neither of these demonstrates Richey’s incompetence in economics, but neither of them demonstrates his competence either, and they both leave him open to further question. When asked by a Board member if “other professors express any political view point?” Pifer answered that “[o]ther professors present no clearcut view points on politics; in general support the national administration in its foreign policy.” This leads one to wonder what he meant when he said that another of his courses “emphasized socialism.” Had he meant that that course merely explained socialism in a neutral way as part of its subject matter? Or had he meant that socialism had been pushed on the students? And, if so, then how did that square with the comment Pifer had just made? Did Pifer believe, as Richey clearly did, that the Truman administration was socialist? The next student up was Paul Kinnucan; we have already encountered Kinnucan writing a letter to Representative Richard Vail characterizing Gange as an “out and out international socialist” and asking Vail to check into Gange’s loyalty since Kinnucan believed him to have “something of the Alger Hiss” about him. Richey read this letter to the Board. To demonstrate the allegedly slanted nature of Gange’s teaching, Kinnucan described this interchange regarding Point IV: In class discussion I asked if it were a valid sphere for government to enter. Mr. Gange cited the post office and education as spheres where government had entered business. Mr. Gange hedged on it. The conversation then shifted to the TVA. Mr. Gange asked me if I had ever been to Tennessee. He stated that if asked how they are doing, Tennessee farmers would say, “Fine.” Then Mr. Gange mentioned Mr. Richey to the effect that you [Kinnucan?] and Mr. Richey go around calling other people pinks. I recall that Mr. Gange said something to the effect that this was a democracy and that you go along with the majority or get out of society, go out in the desert or something. This struck me as strange. Later I talked to Mr. Gange and Mr. Gange stated that I had misunderstood or misinterpreted what he had said, that of course there should always be an opposition to the government in power. What is most odd about this testimony is that it represents the most extensive attempt to damn Gange as an “out and out international socialist”; the burden of it lies on Gange’s support for Point IV, the federal postal service, public education, and the TVA. One could simply

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laugh at the weakness of the case and let it be at that, but that would be to ignore the deeper implications of what was going on. What seems clear is that Richey and Kinnucan believed these to be genuinely and decisively incriminating points—we’ve seen Richey make them before. As we examine the rhetoric and arguments that Richey, and also Kinnucan, have used, it points to the conclusion that they genuinely do not recognize even the existence of any fixed central position between the extremes of no private property and no public property. Any position taken in the middle—the position of liberalism—can only represent a thinly veiled attempt to move America all the way to the extreme left; it cannot be a political resting place, an actual position in and of itself. Theirs is indeed a black and white world, communist or capitalist, slave or free. One more student, James Faris, also a veteran, testified for Richey, praising him as presenting “the whole view point, what is best for the country,” and criticizing the other faculty members as “internationalists.” Faris concluded with an answer to Richey’s question about Gange and the FEPC, testifying that Gange had said in class that “if we don’t plug for FEPC, we will be at war.” Richey finished up his own testimony with the admission that he was “not able to prove that Mr. Gange is a communist. He is a very clever person. Gange stated in class that there is nothing wrong with the public ownership of property.” Moreover, Gange was a “close friend” of Leo Pasvolsky of the Brookings Institution79 and a “firm admirer” of Dean Acheson,80 a friend of James B. Cary, “a member of many communist front organizations.” Also “a member of the University faculty” had stated to Richey that “Gange is a communist and Micaud is as far left as he can be. Mr. Gange left the State Department in August 1947 at a time when many Reds were leaving because of the purge.”81 The complaint to the Board of Visitors was not the only arrow in Richey’s quiver. Trying every possible avenue of support, he had written a letter to Jesse Jones, the original donor to the Woodrow Wilson School, who was considering increasing his gift to the school. Richey alerted him to the disloyal elements in the Woodrow Wilson School and charged that a “whitewash” was underway. Jones forwarded a copy of Richey’s letter to Joseph M. Hartfield of the Wall Street law firm of White & Case, who in turn had written to Darden, telling him, “I question very much the good taste, or propriety, of Mr. Richey in sending the communication to Mr. Jones. I have written to Mr. Jones that I don’t believe there is any merit in the criticism by Mr. Richey of Mr. Gange.”82 One cannot imagine that a university president would appreciate anyone interfering with a source of substantial financial support. Moreover, in going up against Darden himself, Richey betrayed his profound ignorance of the politics of his home state. Darden was an important part of Harry Byrd’s political machine, which was dominant in the state from the mid-1920s until the late 1960s.

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In 1965, on Byrd’s retirement, the Harvard Crimson succinctly described the state of Virginia’s politics under his aegis: Byrd has dominated Virginia politics through networks of county officials entirely subservient to the Democratic organization. Men who disagreed with the Senator on any issue were simply denied public office for the rest of their lives.83 Though some distance would be established between Darden and Byrd over Darden’s opposition to Byrd’s policy of “massive resistance” to racial integration following the Warren Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 US 483 (1954), that was in the future; at this point, Darden had the full power of the political establishment behind him, and Richey had none. This being the case, the conditions generally necessary for the emergence of a red scare did not exist inasmuch as, there being no credible political threat to Virginia’s establishment, there was no political use, for either offensive or defensive purposes, for accusations of communism, while there was a great interest in political affairs continuing smoothly and unobtrusively. In any case, Darden described how Richey had made his charges— not to any responsible member of the university, but to three politicians, Battle, Byrd, and Tuck—and how the university, upon learning of those charges, was dealing with them in an appropriate manner. Darden told Jones that “There has been so far as I know, no disposition on the part of anyone here at the University to ‘whitewash’ or in any way ignore the complaints which Mr. Richey has made.” He went on to explain that “I have not arrayed myself against Mr. Richey, as he intimated in the second paragraph of his letter” but rather have “devoted myself to securing as careful and as unbiased an examination of his charges as is possible.” However, Darden pointed out that he had had “no information from any source, other than Mr. Richey, that would lead me to believe his charges are well founded.” Then Darden noted two circumstances that raised questions in his mind: (1) that Richey had “found no objection” to his fellow faculty members until after he had discovered that his contract with the university was not to be renewed, and (2) that rather than bringing his concerns to Darden’s attentions, “he made repeated assaults upon the School over the radio, and communicated with people in the State who are friendly to the University.” Darden went on to emphasize that the Woodrow Wilson School was doing “good work, work that could not be done save for your thoughtfulness and generosity,” and he promised to keep Jones apprised of all subsequent developments in the matter as they transpired.84 The next meeting of the Board relating to Richey’s accusations came on July 12 when it met to hear John Gange’s testimony. Gange came to the meeting prepared to demolish Richey’s qualifications as being

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negligible—one can only suspect that the Board members by this time were ready to hear and to approve. Gange had prepared for the board members an evaluation based on criteria used at the University of Southern California that had been published in the journal Higher Education (January 15, 1951). The categories included the popularity of a professor with the students; the teacher’s ability to evaluate students; invitations for outside lectures, performance in class, development of adequate teaching aids, professional activities, research, supervision of student theses, training, and experience; and finally professional growth and leadership. In all of these Gange found Richey to be deficient. The results in a few of these categories merit further investigation since they relate to specific claims Richey had made regarding his own performance. One of Richey’s chief defenses was that he was one of the most popular and well-regarded professors among the students; however, Gange’s numbers showed that if one judged popularity on the basis of class enrollment, Richey had the fewest students despite giving out far more grades of “A” than the other teachers (Richey gave a full 65% of his students grades of “A” as opposed to Micaud’s 35%, Gange’s 26%, and Fernbach’s 20%). Moreover, when T. T. Hammond of the History Department had been brought into the School to offer a course in “The Soviet Union in World Affairs,” he had drawn twice the number of students as were enrolled in Richey’s course on Russian politics in the same year. Regarding the students who had testified on Richey’s behalf, Gange noted that five of them were still in Richey’s classes and that therefore they were under some pressure. Moreover, among the students who had written letters supporting Richey in 1948 when his teaching had been questioned, Gange testified that they “in almost every case were requested to do so by Mr. Richey while they were still members” of his classes. Gange also told the Board that he had received no requests to have Richey teach at other institutions, while Micaud had been invited to Harvard, Columbia, and Wyoming and Fernbach had been invited to the University of Wisconsin. Barron Black asked if there had been offers of positions at other institutions for members of the Woodrow Wilson faculty, and Gange answered that Micaud had had a definite offer from the University of California and a tentative offer from Yale; however, he knew of no offers to Fernbach or Richey. Richey’s background to teach in the field of foreign affairs was inadequate, Gange went on, because first of all, Richey had received both his master’s degree and his Ph. D. in philosophy. As far as Richey’s experience as a “practitioner,” Richey had been an aide-de-camp, not an adviser, to General Wickersham. Regarding research, Fernbach had a grant from the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences for a book on Korea and was also the holder of a Fulbright grant for study in Europe, while Micaud had received two research grants for study and was currently on leave as a research

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associate at Yale. Richey had no such credentials. And while Fernbach had edited three books, written a chapter in another, and published two articles in professional journals along with many book reviews and while Micaud had written a book, chapters in two others, and published five articles and about 30 book reviews in US and foreign journals, Richey had only a few book reviews to his credit. Gange finished this part of his testimony with the statement that not only was Richey “practically unknown” among the faculty members in foreign affairs at other US institutions, but also, rather than grow professionally, it seemed that Richey had “dropped off” in comparison with the other staff members. When asked if given the choice, would he let Richey go now? Gange answered that he probably would never have hired him to begin with and that given Richey’s attacks on the whole School, conditions there would be “intolerable” if Richey returned. Now Gange turned to his defense against Richey’s accusations against him. He refuted Richey’s charge that Richey had been discriminated against for his role in John Battle’s gubernatorial campaign by pointing out that he (Gange) had been living in Maryland at the time, knew nothing about the campaign, and had not been interested in Virginia politics. Regarding his own political reliability, he noted that he had received three full checks by the FBI and that one of them—the ECA check—“was the “tightest with the possible exception of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Central Intelligence Agency.” To Richey, these security checks meant nothing; rather, he made accusations that treated coincidental events as important evidence: “I left the State Department in April 1947 and because I did, according to Richey, I am a ‘red’ because many alleged communists left the State Department at that time.” Yet while in the State Department, Gange had had a role in drafting the Truman Doctrine, “the strongest statement yet made against communism.” Gange continued, wondering, “What definition do you use for a ‘pink’?” The members of his department included Acting Associate Professor Geza Teleki, who had fled from the communists in Hungary and was supported by the National Committee for a Free Europe; Dr. Leng, who had fled from the Chinese communists and had risked his life many times as a member of the Chinese National Air Force fighting against the communists; and Dr Gross, visiting professor, who had been a refugee from Poland and was supported by the National Committee for a Free Europe. Some of these people came from deeply conservative backgrounds: Teleki was from the “most conservative of the Hungarian aristocracy” and was the son of a former premier; Leng came from a “well-to-do” Chinese Nationalist background and was “a traditionalist and conservative”; another teacher, Speakman, was a conservative who had worked as public relations man for the DuPont Company: such people would never have given Gange their support if he had had any “‘pink’ tinge.” Regarding his own associations, he stated that he was proud to be

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a friend of Leo Pasvolsky, whom he considered “one of the outstanding political scientists in this country,” and, yes, he admired Dean Acheson and believed that in 30 years’ time Acheson would be classed by historians as one of the great US Secretaries of State. Regarding the statement he had made in class about the FEPC, Gange said that to begin with, although he believed that in federal employment a person “should not be discriminated against because of race, creed or color,” in general he saw the FEPC as the “worst way to get cooperation between the races” because “you can’t legislate such matters.” However, what he had said in class was that “we must take into consideration what other people in the world think of us in our handling of race problems in this country.” Asked about the political positions of Fernbach and Micaud, Gange said that they were left of center “in the same sense that Presidents F. D. Roosevelt and Truman put themselves ‘left of center.’” Asked how far left they were, Gange replied that insofar as he knew their political views, he thought that Micaud believed that the existing socialist and center party coalition was what France had needed to serve as a buffer between the communists and the fascists and that he was opposed to communism, while Fernbach was a liberal who voted for the Democratic Party. Pressed further with the question of whether either of the two “advocated leftist political ideology,” Gange answered that he had never heard either of them “advocate socialism or any policy properly called socialistic” and that the reading lists they used in their classes contained books expressing both right-wing and left-wing views.85 In the meantime, Richey seems to have decided that it would help his case if he were able to dig up some dirt on Gange, and so he wrote two letters, both dated August 27, 1951, one to former communist and Soviet spy turned informant and expert witness Louis Budenz, and one to Mary Stalcup Markward, who had worked undercover for seven years for the FBI as a member of the Washington, DC, branch of the Communist Party. In both letters he requested information about Gange, writing, “I strongly suspect that Gange had Communist affiliations somewhere along the way.”86 Neither of these requests drew a response; presumably the recipients had nothing to offer. This same day, August 27, articles about the Woodrow Wilson School controversy appeared in regional newspapers, starting what Richey called the “surge of publicity.” Richey also notes that the story was written up after several Charlottesville (the town in which the University of Virginia is located) readers of the Washington Times-Herald wrote to inquire why this paper had printed nothing about the charges Richey was making over the radio about the Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs.87 The headline read “WILSON SCHOOL AT VIRGINIA U. BRANDED ‘PINK,’” and the article went on to quote Richey’s statement that the school had a “definitely pink—if not dark-hued red complexion.” The one

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feature of this article worthy of special note is that in its closing paragraph it quoted Senator Harry Byrd, the great political power of Virginia to whom Richey had sent a copy of his original aide-memoire detailing his accusations. Byrd was quoted as saying of Richey, “He’s a lawyer, isn’t he? I didn’t know he was on the University faculty. I’ve never heard of any Communists at the University of Virginia.”88 Upon receiving a copy of the minutes for the last Board of Visitors meeting, Richey subsequently wrote a 16-page rebuttal of Gange’s testimony, a rebuttal that was central to the final meeting of the Board on the Richey petition. Given that the rebuttal and the meeting interlock so closely, it might make for the greatest clarity if we consider them together, following the structure of the Board meeting. It was on September 13, 1951, that the Board of Visitors had its last meeting to hear evidence relevant to the Richey petition. It met to hear Micaud and Fernbach, neither of whom had been previously available, and to hear John Gange’s response to Richey’s “rebuttal.” The first person to appear before the board was Charles Micaud. In the rebuttal, Richey had acknowledged that he had “unwittingly and unknowingly” done Micaud an injustice in not crediting him with a published book as well as articles. Having made amends, Richey went on to use the book as the basis of an attack against Micaud. He wrote that he had read it and found that it contained “such interesting statements” as: “The bogey (sic! [Richey’s “sic”]) of the ‘Red menace’ was obviously used by the Extreme Right to promote the success of the counterrevolution in France and in Europe.” Richey read further and found: “Spain was the first battlefield between fascism and reactionary traditionalism on the one side, and democracy and communism on the other.” Richey went on to write, “Lest I be accused of picking isolated statements out of context, I respectfully invite any member of the Board to read the book, the whole tone of which indicates the author’s political slant far better than any single quotation therefrom.” Micaud had read this statement; he also knew that Richey had accused him of being “frankly socialistic,” of having acknowledged as much in class, and of having been “for a long time” “very lenient toward the Soviet Union.” He also had been accused of being born French and not a Virginian, the one accusation he would not seek to refute. Micaud began with a forthright statement: Mr. Richey has accused me of being “as far to the Left as possible” and of being “an avowed Socialist.” These expressions, I gather, are synonymous. I take exception to this accusation and other irresponsible statements by him. I am not a Socialist. I favor the Democratic Party and have never supported the Socialist or Wallace groups. I believe that the capitalistic system in the United States has been quite successful; it has

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expanded production enormously, has given decent living standards to most people of this land, and above all has allowed the American people to maintain their faith in democratic ideals and institutions. This is the primary reason I decided to become an American citizen back in 1936. He continued, stating that he considered it his duty as a teacher to “be objective and not to influence my students by giving a one-sided interpretation.” Acknowledging that his “sympathy” was “obviously with the democratic forces in Western Europe,” he maintained that he had not attempted to hide the “shortcomings, weaknesses and errors” of those forces. Then, after a brief summation of the currently existing political forces acting in France, Micaud turned to Richey’s attack on his book, The French Right and Nazi Germany, 1932–1939: A Study of Public Opinion. He explained that his purpose in the book was to trace “the foreign policy of the French Right, and particularly of the Fascist and pro-Fascist Extreme Right, to show the reasons behind their policy of appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini, which was to be so disastrous for France and for the world.” He reminded the Board that at the time the book was published in 1945 the main danger was that of fascism and the United States was allied with the USSR. Though “most people had all kinds of illusions about our Russian allies,” Micaud himself was “well aware of the dangers ahead in the post-war period,” and, in fact, the last sentence of the book had sounded the warning that “the ideological war will not be ended by the defeat of the Axis.” After giving some examples of the scholarly praise that his book had received, Micaud went on to explain his political position. He recognized that the “greatest danger” currently “is obviously that of communism,” and that his fellowship from the Institute of International Studies at Yale had been for the purpose of going to France to discover why people joined the Communist Party, why they remained in it, and why they left it. With this background, he concluded, I am quite as aware as Mr. Richey of the Communist danger and I believe that all necessary measures should be taken to prevent Communist infiltration. I also believe that nothing can so cripple this country and benefit the Communists as the creation of a state of hysterical fear. The members of the Board then took the opportunity to question Micaud. Barron Black asked which political party he had supported in France; Micaud explained that when he left France at the age of 26, he had not been affiliated with any party, but that “philosophically” he identified with the Center Party.

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Asked why Richey had attacked the faculty of the Woodrow Wilson School, Micaud replied: I was much surprised at the attack. I had always been on friendly terms with Mr. Richey. I believe Mr. Richey’s life centered around the University and he was very much disappointed when he found out his appointment would not be renewed when it expires next spring. To the question “[h]ave you ever told anyone you were a Socialist?” Micaud answered that he had not and that he did not know where Richey got his information, and then, asked if he advocated public ownership of property, he said “Not in America. I believed it would help France after World War II, but I have been disillusioned.” Moreover, when asked outright if he was a socialist, he said, “No. I am a Democrat.” Micaud was followed by Alfred P. Fernbach. Fernbach was little mentioned in Richey’s rebuttal, but previously Richey had characterized him as “Homer Richey’s worst enemy on the University faculty,” in addition to being accused of being “VERY far to the left.” According to Richey, Fernbach was a socialist who had been “quite enthusiastic” about the “great experiment within the Soviet Union” as late as 1947, and he had objected strenuously to Richey’s appointment because “it was well known that the writer [Richey] was anti-Russian.” Richey had also described Fernbach as “underhanded and scheming,” having tried to “cut the writer’s throat from behind,” “pedantic,” “pettily authoritative,” and lacking “the depth of insight and vision which a University teacher ought to have.” Finally, Richey had accused Fernbach of engaging in a nefarious conspiracy with John Gange to get rid of Homer G. Richey. Fernbach opened with a statement in which he first of all defended the Woodrow Wilson School from the charges of being “socialistic,” presenting a “party line,” and indoctrinating students. He said, “I do not believe that any of these charges are true. I have never heard a member of the staff attempt to indoctrinate the students with socialism or any other philosophy.” He went on to forthrightly deny that he was “far to the left” or a socialist, or had been enthusiastic about the Soviet Union. He said, “Mr. Richey has little basis for making such sweeping charges, since it was not his custom to attend my classes, he never discussed my views with me, and he is apparently unaware of my writings and the opinions expressed in them.” Fernbach also qualified Gange’s description of his political views as “slightly left of center,” pointing out that in his 1941 doctoral dissertation he had opposed federalization of unemployment compensation, “for I do not believe in the all-powerful state, nor in too much centralization of power.” Also, he had never been “enthusiastic” about the Soviet Union, either in 1947 or before then, being “strongly opposed to communism” and “well aware of the dangerous policies of the Soviet Union.” He acknowledged that until 1947 he had held some

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hope that “a basis might be found for negotiating settlements of some of the differences between the Soviet Union and ourselves,” but held that this did not constitute an attitude of friendship. Furthermore, he reminded the committee, “to cope with an enemy, one must know about him.” He then pointed out that in making accusations, Richey had resorted to a bit of special pleading, adducing as evidence of Fernbach’s left-wing opinions “certain authors on the reading lists of my course on the Far East whom he alleges are communists or communist sympathizers.” However, Fernbach noted, Richey “carefully” neglected to mention other authors on the same list, people like Paul Linebarger89 and Chiang Kai-shek who were “very unsympathetic” to communism. The point, Fernbach said, was that he tried to present many points of view to his students because he believed this to be “a sound and honest method of teaching.” Fernbach then turned to Richey’s charges of personal enmity and conspiracy. He admitted that he had opposed Richey’s appointment, but only because of the fact that it had been made without reference to the committee charged with setting up the Woodrow Wilson School, of which he was a member. He said, “I did not and could not have opposed his appointment on the basis of his political views, since I had never before heard of Mr. Richey and consequently did not know his views.” He added, “Nor have I ever kept a file of Mr. Richey’s writings—in verse or other style— nor hatched any plot against him in my conference with Mr. Gange . . . Mr. Gange has never discussed with me the work of any member of the teaching staff except my own.” And finally, “Mr. Richey is correct, however, in assuming that I have not had confidence in his ability as a teacher.” Fernbach finished his statement with a brief reference to Richey’s attack on his teaching methods and course content. He said, “I am sure that there is room for improvement with respect to both of these matters” and then added that there seemed to be “at least one point” on which Richey had changed his mind, for, according to Fernbach, when he had asked Richey early on for his opinion on presenting a seminar devoted to the problems of development of underdeveloped areas, Richey had expressed his approval, in marked contrast to the contempt he later expressed for such a course. Fernbach was then questioned on a number of points. He said that he had formed no opinion of Richey as a teacher until he participated with him in the 1946 lectures on atomic energy sponsored by the Extension Division (from which Richey had claimed he was asked to withdraw because he would not “plug for” international control of atomic energy). According to Fernbach, when it was Richey’s turn to lecture, he “spoke very briefly on atomic energy and then launched into an attack on President Roosevelt. Mr. Richey was most insulting to several members of the panel.” One Board member recalled that Richey had charged Fernbach with advocating the recognition of communist China “as late as 1947” and then invited Fernbach to explain “under what circumstances should we recognize Red China?” Fernbach replied without indicating where he

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stood on the issue, by outlining two possible policies: “(1) the Jeffersonian doctrine of international law recognizing any de facto government, and (2) the Wilsonian, or the weapon technique.” He then went on to (possibly) hint at where he stood by noting the “British hope that through recognition, China can be separated from Russia.” The last two accusations that Fernbach rebutted were (1) that the Woodrow Wilson School staff—Richey excepted—were uncritical advocates of Truman administration policy and (2) that the staff were similarly uncritical advocates of the Point Four program. His answer concerned only himself; he averred that he had been critical of the State Department policy in Eastern Europe since 1945, objecting to the US having left a vacuum in Rumania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. “We should have given aid sooner and should never have let the puppet governments of those countries administer the aid.” Had this course been followed, “we might have been able to save these countries from Communism.” Regarding Point Four, he said that he believed that the US should be concentrating more on technical assistance than on cash infusions for underdeveloped countries. Asked straightforwardly, “Are you a Socialist?” he answered, “Definitely not. If you mean, do I advocate the public ownership of natural resources, no. I am a member of the Kiwanis Club and I am not a hypocrite.”90 Now John Gange returned before the Board to respond to the charges in Richey’s rebuttal, charges that had taken up almost all of Richey’s 16-page document. Overall, Richey’s rebuttal represents the final effort of a man who is fighting for his job as well as his convictions, and the tactic that Richey used was to adduce every possible detail, great or small, that he believed had been distorted and to attribute all these alleged distortions to Gange’s alleged malevolence. Gange answered 26 points in exhaustive detail. Following are some of the main points of contention: regarding Gange’s employment of the University of Southern California criteria for assessment of professors’ performances, Richey writes: These “criteria” were assumedly the basis for my dismissal (or what in effect was a dismissal) in May 1950. Yet, just below this, he refers to criteria used at Univ. of So. Cal and appearing in some periodical bearing date of January 15,1951. Professor Einstein performs curious tricks with time and space, but this is the first time I ever heard of criteria obtained in January of one year being used to arrive at a decision made in May of the PREVIOUS year—if not sooner! Gange replies, “USC ‘Criteria’ used because Richey had rejected criteria I had used in 1950.” Then there are matters that are more substantive, such as Richey’s claim that with regard to attending Faculty meetings (which for some reason he limits to the session on 1949/50, he [Gange] has me attending NONE of them.

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This is absolutely untrue. I distinctly remember going to several, if not the greater majority of Faculty meetings held during that year. In fact, Gange had absolutely no way of knowing or checking on whether I was there or not, as he missed many of them himself, as I distinctly remember, because he used to call the staff together before such meetings, explain that he couldn’t attend and INSTRUCTING the members of the Staff who did attend on how he wished them to vote on certain matters on the agenda! To this Gange answers: I said on July 12 that to the best of my knowledge Richey had not attended faculty meetings during the year 1949–50. He was not present at the five I attended and they included two very critical meetings on the issue of college students taking courses in the Department of Law. I do not recall his being present at two other meetings when matters came up affecting the Honors program (of no importance to WWSFA) or the meeting to approve the awarding of degrees. The main point regarding these types of disagreements or misunderstandings is that to Richey they represented deliberate falsehoods on Gange’s part, not only damaging to himself but also establishing Gange’s low moral character and lack of fitness for his position. In Richey’s mind, there was not a single point he made that was trivial; all came together to establish the greater ominous plot that, as Richey repeatedly emphasized, endangered not merely Homer G. Richey but also the Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs, the University of Virginia, and the United States of America. However, space, time, and the probable limits of the reader’s patience all advise against going into each and every point, so we will limit ourselves to a few of the main issues that have already cropped up. One issue Richey made much of was the claim that he had ever said that his class was popular with the students; rather, he pointed out, in his petition to the Board he had written that his courses “were regarded by many students as being the best courses in the University.” Then he went on to argue that “if we disregard mere numbers of students in courses . . . and take into account such real factors as the enthusiasm I arouse in my students and the high level of scholastic performance I am able to get out of them, then I will say right now that my courses are probably as popular with the students who take them as any in the University.” This, he said, explained why he gave such high grades; this was not an indication of laxity but rather of the fact that his courses “attract the best students in the School” and that he inspired in those students a “far higher level of performance than any other instructor in the School.” Gange responded to this with palpable contempt, writing first that “whether Richey claims ‘best course’ or ‘most popular courses’ is largely a matter of semantics; the implication of his remarks, to me, was that

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students flocked to him because of his ‘superior instruction.’” Then Gange added: It is a preposterous boast that he “attracts the best students” and “inspires . . . a far higher level of performance” Mr. Richey has attracted at least five of our poorest students in the past two years and several others who consistently received from other teachers (in and out of the School of Foreign Affairs), lower grades than Richey gave them. One student came to our office recently to ask what courses Richey would give next year, for, he said, “I need some A’s to graduate.” Another area of Richey’s rebuttal that deserves some attention is his statement regarding his record of research or the lack thereof. He wrote, “I freely admit to NO PUBLISHED RESEARCH. On the other hand, THIRTY-ONE radio talks obviously have required SOME RESEARCH.” To this, Gange answered, “Any person who reads carefully Richey’s radio broadcasts will find very little evidence of any real research. Quotes from John T. Flynn and paraphrases of Westbrook Pegler’s column will normally represent the ‘research’ Richey has undertaken.”91 Regarding the issue of Gange’s previous reference to Richey’s verse (which, it will be recalled, was the basis of Richey’s concluding that Gange and Fernbach had conspired against him even before Gange arrived at the Woodrow Wilson School), Gange said, “I have not to this day seen the verse Richey is so proud of and believes would so fully acquaint a reader with the issues of the Battle-Miller campaign of 1949. I said, and repeat, that in August of 1949 alumni of WWSFA told me that Richey had written some jingles for the press on the Virginia gubernatorial campaign.” In the end, Richey’s charges of outrageous falsehood against John Gange came down to this: did Gange call Richey an “isolationist” or not, and, if so, precisely what did he mean by that; what did Gange mean by putting quotation marks around the word “Americanism” when he used it in reference to Richey; and finally did Gange call Richey antisocial or not? (which, of course, would be in keeping with Richey being an isolationist). Looking over Gange’s previous testimony, Richey found that the “most notorious of these falsehoods is what Gange said he said about FEPC or rather what his views on FEPC are. This is absolutely contradicted by the testimony of three other men.” As we have already seen, Richey here is guilty of a lie inasmuch as one of his three men, Douglas Hinkle, had said only that “Mr. Gange in a lecture stated that most of the people in the world are colored and are watching the treatment of Negroes in the United States. Hence, it is important for us to treat Negroes properly.” It seems an odd lie to tell, given that the truth was so readily accessible to the members of the Board from their own minutes; one can only guess that a man so little capable of objectivity and of gleaning shades of meaning as

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Richey seemed to be simply did not see that Hinkle’s testimony did not support Richey’s view of what Gange had said. Gange’s own response was to “deny having stated that students must support FEPC or have war.” He went on to elaborate his views, saying, “I readily admit to pointing out that to reject the equalitarian and humanitarian principles implicit in an FEPC would be putting us in a very difficult position if war came and that such a rejection of the principles of our Declaration of Independence played directly into Communist hands and thereby strengthened the probability of war.” The most serious of Richey’s charges from the university’s point of view, of course, was that the Woodrow Wilson School itself was “pink” or worse, a charge that Richey reiterated in his rebuttal. Richey made this accusation: I always knew Fernbach and Micaud were leftists, but before Gange arrived the ratio in the School was only two to one, leftist. After Gange arrived, I wanted to give him the benefit of every doubt though I knew he was left of center. But when I saw others of the same persuasion being brought into the School, and the only conservative (with the exception of Teleki who was added later) being eased out, I saw clearly what was going on. Also it was not until AFTER my dismissal that Gange revealed his true colors to such an extent that I clearly saw just how far to the left he was. He went on to defend himself against charges of “undue delay” in reporting the situation, writing, “I told Mr. Dillard of the situation in the early summer of 1950. I also wrote to Mr. Gooch about that time.” Gange countered this with a reiteration that both President Darden and Dean Lewis had told him that Richey had “never complained to them of any defects in the School, ‘pink’ or otherwise, until he was called in to explain his charges made to political figures and over the radio, in February 1951.” As for Richey’s going to Dillard and Gooch, that “did not make even elementary sense as Gooch had hired both Fernbach and Micaud and Dillard had recommended me as director. Both men had heard all three of us lecture and participate in round table meetings. They hardly would have recommended us if they thought we were ‘pink.’” And finally, regarding the political complexion of the Woodrow Wilson School, Gange said, There obviously is no point in trying to answer comments by a man who calls anyone a “pink” with whom he disagrees. Richey accepts at face value whatever appears in the press that accords with his view and with fervor near to an apoplectic stroke rejects whatever is said in the same press if he disagrees with it. (See for examples his letters to the Cavalier Daily last Spring; that engaging performance of a teacher

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Homer G. Richey and the Power of a Symbol calling students names, deriding them and making corny remarks about signed initials of the letters’ authors.)

In the few questions that were then directed at him, Gange made two points worthy of note: first, in response to a query regarding his role in the “Cerebrus letter,” Gange said, “I read it for the first time in the Cavalier Daily. The story originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine.” And his last recorded comment in the meeting was to make the point that though Richey was claiming discrimination because of his political views, still Gange had approved Richey’s offering a graduate course on the philosophy of politics. “I certainly would not have approved his teaching this course if I had wanted to throttle him in the expression of his political views.”92 With the conclusion of these hearings, everything moved with a rapidity that suggests, if not actual coordination, at least a universal readiness to move in a given direction. The next day, September 14, 1951, the Board of Visitors issued a statement reading: RESOLVED, that the petition of Mr. Richey that he be elevated to a full professorship and that Mr. Gange be dismissed from the faculty of the Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs be denied; that the evidence adduced in support of the petition does not warrant the action demanded; that the Board finds no evidence justifying the conclusions stated by Mr. Richey concerning the professional qualifications and fitness of his associates on the faculty.93 The next day President Darden received a letter from the eight deans of the university commending Gange and the Woodrow Wilson School and urging Richey’s removal from the staff of the Woodrow Wilson School on the grounds that Richey, by attacks that “have far exceeded the bounds of courtesy and of professional standards of conduct,” had “created a situation in which it is impossible for him to work harmoniously with the staff of the School.”94 The same day Darden received a letter from Gange that reported that all the members of the Woodrow Wilson School staff save one believed that Richey “should be relieved immediately of his teaching in the School and of any formal connection with the School” and that the one dissident took his position on the grounds that “while Mr. Richey’s actions toward his colleagues are deserving of the most vigorous censure, he believes that it would merely strengthen Mr. Richey’s hand in attacking the School if Mr. Richey were relieved of his connection before the scheduled termination of his contract in June, 1952.”95 That was on September 15, and it was two days later, on September 17, that the ax fell upon the neck of Homer Richey’s academic career. President Darden wrote him a letter informing him that because Richey

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had for many months “engaged in a campaign calculated to injure” his colleagues and because his charges had been found by unanimous vote to be “without substance” it was Darden’s “unpleasant duty” to relieve him of his position. Darden added that “[i]t is my own belief that you have accused our colleagues wrongly and that you have done them a grave injustice.” He finished by telling Richey: The manner in which you have attempted to rouse the passions of people already deeply troubled and apprehensive over communism against your colleagues, the School over to our part, and the University under whose control it functions, is unworthy of one holding your position. Effective today, you will be relieved of your duties as a member of the staff of the Woodrow Wilson School. Until the end of the present session, at which time your contract expires, you will be assigned such duties as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences deems appropriate.96 Never daunted, Richey promptly wrote back to Darden that he (Richey) would not “retract one iota of the charges” against his “long-suffering colleagues” and that he was “quite unimpressed” at the “spectacle of these assorted Deans being put through their paces at a command performance,” adding that it was “not an edifying thing nor one calculated to bring credit upon the University.”97 Richey also wrote a letter to the Rector of the Board, Barron F. Black, who had voted against him, but toward whom, perhaps because of the always very courteous tone of Black’s letters, Richey seems to have felt some warmth. Richey also seems to have been under the curious impression that Black was somehow on his (Richey’s) side. He told Black that “[a]s to President Darden, I was well aware of the fact that he had been back of Gange from the beginning,” and “I sincerely believe that the appointment of Darden to the presidency of the University was a statewide disaster of the first magnitude.”98 A number of letters came in to Darden, almost all applauding the dismissal of Richey. However, one letter, from Eustace Mullins, worried that “the American patriot Thomas Jefferson would not recognize his school,” a school that “has never been so embarrassed as today, when you place it in the position of supporting the foreign ideology of Communism by firing Dr. Homer G. Richey.” Mullins went on to warn that A Senator of the United States was defeated last year because he whitewashed a number of fellow-travelers and Communists in our government. Does the example of Millard Tydings mean nothing to you? The threat of war with Russia is too real to permit us to coddle these starry-eyed devotees of Marx any longer . . . In

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Homer G. Richey and the Power of a Symbol the face of [Richey’s] outspoken Americanism, you retreat into the vague mumbo-jumbo reminiscent of Acheson’s defense of Alger Hiss and President Truman’s shameful attack on Senator McCarthy.99

Darden’s response was brief: one sentence acknowledged receipt of Mullins’s letter; the next informed him that Richey’s charges had been examined by two committees and found to be without substance. Finally, he noted, “The action which I took does not place the University in position of supporting communism. Yours truly, Colgate W. Darden, Jr.”100 It was perhaps less than noble, yet understandable, that The Cavalier Daily wrote a finis to the matter in a September 19 editorial that crowed “Goodbye Mr. Richey” and gloatingly told its readers that “to those of us who have been nauseated by Homer G. Richey’s reckless attack against the Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs, Monday’s announcement of his release from teaching duties at the University brought instant relief.” The editorial went on to describe “Hopalong Homer,” the local “apostle of McCarthyism” aiming his guns, “smoking with hot air” at the Board of Directors, as a man who knew “no bounds of courtesy or decency.” And it closed the chapter by stamping on Richey’s academic grave: Is Mr. Richey, aiding the welfare of this institution by scattering through the nation charges that now seem only the products of his own malice? Is Mr. Richey aiding the welfare of the institution by implying that its faculty is tainted with “Reds and pinks”? Is Mr. Richey aiding the welfare of the nation by using the armor of academic freedom to hide the weapons of character assassination and the tools of the guilt-by-implication-trade? We think not. Instead, we thoroughly believe that by his reckless, wanton, and baseless charges, Mr. Richey has ignored every Jeffersonian ideal for which this University stands. We feel he is a disgrace to Virginia, to the men and women of this institution, and to all standards of tolerance or fair play. Thus we say, “Goodbye, Mr. Richey,” with neither sorrow nor sentiment, feeling his departure was brought on by only one man—himself.101 The very last we hear of Richey in the pages of The Cavalier Daily is: Richey, who was relieved of his teaching duties in September, is now completing a project for translating some of the writings of Thomas Jefferson into German. A few weeks ago he announced he would run for Congress in the next election.102

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Analysis As we review the material relating to communism in these documents, the symbol that appears again and again and again is the color symbol. The word “red” is used more often than the word “communist,” but it clearly means communist. The use of the word “pink,” however, is much more ambiguous. In this chapter we have seen these words used freely by all participants as referential shortcuts; so, the Richmond Times-Dispatch can refer to a “made-in-Moscow” “stream of pink, tepid lemonade,” and student PMC is concerned about Moger’s alleged point of view that there were no “Reds or pinks on our college campuses.” We have seen Homer Richey say that Gange as well as Micaud and Fernbach were “left-wing, in fact pink,” and, in his radio broadcasts, we have seen him denounce the “heavy infiltration of pinks and reds into our institutions of higher learning.” And then if enough pink or red people agglomerate we can get an entire institution that has that coloration as when Richey “herewith ASSERTS and REAFFIRMS what he has said on many occasions and to many people, both privately and publicly, that the complexion of the School is DEFINITELY PINK if not a DARK HUED RED.” We also have indications of people feeling some discomfort regarding this terminology. Alan Moger, for example, shows some alarm regarding the “careless,” “reckless and irresponsible” abuse of language, conflating “reds,” “pinks,” and progressives without ever clearly stating what was meant by these terms, and he seems to be aware that somehow this terminology is enabling the process by which liberals become labeled as dangerous “friends of Moscow.” And Gene Bruns warns his readers that “[i]t is much too easy to call one a red or a pink; it saves us from thinking and doing any constructive work.” Still, we find liberals freely falling into the use of the terminology. Gange, testifying before the Board of Visitors, stops to wonder, “What definition do you use for a ‘pink’?” before going on to assure the Board that the refugees from communism in his School would never have given Gange their support if he had had any “‘pink’ tinge.” And another time we have seen Fernbach assuring the board that none of the faculty accused of “pinkishness” or worse by Richey would have been recommended for their positions if the committee doing the hiring had “thought we were ‘pink.’” Symbols have their own internal structures, and, if one accepts the symbol, one is forced to accept the structure of the symbol and all that that might imply. This kind of verbal expression represents an underlying thought/belief pattern that in turn structures action. The red-pink terminology suggests—no, actually embodies—a linear continuum that has a definite endpoint at either extreme. After all, pink is red lightened with white, so the polarity logically runs from red to white. Anything in between will be a pink, of either a whiter or redder hue, but still pink. Like most things that become part of the cultural language, the exact

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terms of this continuum go largely undefined and unquestioned, but if we are to understand the symbol, its thought-structuring patterns, how those patterns influence the way people think, which in turn influences how people vote, which determines who gets elected to office, which determines which policies do and which do not get enacted, if we are to understand these things, we need to take a closer and more careful look at what this symbol means. So, we begin with a continuum that runs from pure red to pure white. We also have a clear dominant cultural bias that sees this as a moral continuum, that pure white is completely good just as pure red is completely bad—nobody, absolutely nobody, in any of the material I’ve examined ever metaphorically stands up and proclaims “I’m proud to be pink!” If red is bad, then pink is “bad-ish,” a kind of skulking or as the Richmond Times-Dispatch put it, “tepid” badness, surely no cause for pride. If we accept that this color continuum represents a polarity in which red means completely bad and white means completely good, we still are faced with the question what is completely bad? What is completely good? What phenomena do these colors represent? Here, ironically, Homer Richey is perhaps one of our clearest thinkers. It is crystal clear in his mind that the defining issue is private property. As he wrote in his response to WAC, “when government agencies are made the instruments for the redistribution of wealth, or when such things as TVA run competitively with private capital, then we are on the way to socialism.” He also wrote, “I would call still another person a pink . . . who believes in the principle of ‘the public ownership of property,’ a regimentation over economic life by the state along the New-Fair Deal pattern (which is socialistic by definition), who plugs openly in favor of FEPC.” And what is his stated object to FEPC? That it represents “the SUPPRESSION rather than the PROTECTION of human freedom, in this case the freedom to hire and fire WHOM ONE PLEASES.” In this latter statement we find the crux of a political problem, i.e., the combination of the principle of private property with the principle of “human freedom.” Certainly, this was the view of the group of businessmen who in the summer of 1934, under the auspices of the three du Pont brothers, Pierre, Irenee, and Lammot, began to meet periodically to discuss creating a “propertyholders’ association” to disseminate “information as to the dangers to investors posed by the New Deal.” In her book detailing the business reaction against the New Deal, Invisible Hands, historian Kim Phillips-Fein relates that “the group decided that the name of their association should not refer directly to property—it would be better to frame their activities as a broad defense of the Constitution” and it should be allied with other organizations that, in the mind of Irenee du Pont, defended the Constitution, such as the American Legion and “even the Ku Klux Klan.”103 Thus, with an explicit link to private property concerns, was born the Liberty League. And this equation of the unfettered use of private property with freedom is the heart of

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modern conservatism, exemplified in its purest form by the thinking of men like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek—both supported enthusiastically by contemporary American businessmen—who argued that “[t]he system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.”104 The literature on the meaning of freedom is enormous; however, this book is concerned with the political realm, not the academic, and in that context I believe that it is best to consider freedom in its simplest possible terms, i.e., that a person is free to the extent that he or she can do what he/she wants when he/she wants. If we consider it this way, then we can say that—the limitations of nature aside—there is such a thing as complete freedom, that is, that the person—like a person marooned alone on a desert island—who can do whatever they want whenever they want is completely free. Problems arise, however, as soon as we have two people, as soon as someone else is washed up on that island. At that point, freedom becomes a zero-sum proposition: to the extent that person A is free to do what she wants, to the same extent person B is not free to do what he wants. And if person A is completely free, then person B can only be a slave, a person with no freedom. In classical liberalism, then, private property becomes the indispensable support to freedom because having, through the social contract, agreed to give up much of our ability to do what we want when we want, i.e., our freedom, we still maintain that ability within the realm of our property. Our property, as an ideal type at least, is the place where we can still experience and exercise absolute freedom. It is just this association of private property with individual freedom that Marxism—associating private property with the division of labor— challenges. The division of labor limits one’s ability to do what one wants, i.e., freedom, while, Marx wrote, “in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”105 So we have two ways of thought, diametrically opposed on the matter of property, but both seeking the same end, i.e., to maintain the maximum amount of personal freedom that is consistent with living socially. One difficulty is that what distinguishes the socialist from the communist is not their beliefs about private property—both believe that it is the chief source of “unfreedom” and should be done away with—but their belief about the path to the abolition of private property. Lenin, the progenitor of communism, famously rejected the machinery of democracy as the path to socialism, seeing democracy as something that would only

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be possible after the achievement of socialism through revolution, while his opponents within the Marxist movement saw democracy as the indispensable means to socialism, a means without which a socialist movement could degenerate into tyranny. This is where liberals and social democrats found themselves on the defensive: social democracy and communism both call for the public ownership of social resources; the main difference between the two lies in their stance vis-à-vis political democracy and its role in the road to socialism. Traditionally communists have disdained democracy as a means to arrive at socialism, while social democrats have embraced it. Liberals keep an allegiance to private property, markets, and the profit system and, therefore, embrace a much more modest program of economic redistribution than either communists or social democrats; still, the fact that they are willing to compromise the principle of property at all renders them, at best, suspect in conservative eyes.106 If one—consciously or unconsciously— accepts and internalizes the red-pink-white spectrum metaphor, then the equation built into that metaphor of illogically conflated qualities and values—red/no private property/slavery/evil vs. white/complete private property/complete freedom/good—puts anyone who would occupy the middle ground in a hopelessly compromised position as endorsing and embracing “moderate evil.” Given the moral burden associated with the red/pink symbolism, liberals cannot possibly acknowledge themselves to be “pink,” and yet by the terms of the symbol they are inescapably pink. The powerful consequences associated with the acceptance of this symbolism are exemplified in a full-page advertisement sponsored by Bohn Aluminum and Brass that appeared in the April 12, 1952, Saturday Evening Post: beside a picture of a tumbler that has fallen from the grasp of a lifeless hand is a caption that reads: “It Looked Safe but it was deadly poison. A dose of Socialism can be just as deadly. It kills freedom . . . leads to Communism. Would you risk a little Poison?”107 Liberalism, with its welfare state policies, represents the “dose of Socialism”; a little red (i.e., pink) is equivalent to a little poison, and so we see that in the red-pink-white symbolism, the middle ground seems to be acknowledged but is actually delegitimized and, in fact—since there can be no such thing as “a little” death—cut out. The economic position this represents was expressed by capitalists like Irénée du Pont, who described the New Deal as “nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another name.”108 William Clinton Mullendore, the president of Southern California Edison Company, was likewise in deadly earnest when he told Leonard Read, the manager of the Western Division of the United States Chamber of Commerce, that there was no middle ground, that “[w]e cannot have both systems—that is, both the governmentally controlled and directed and the free enterprise system. We must have one or the other.”109 There is nothing to indicate that either of these men considered themselves to be employing hyperbole. Thus, the red-pink-white continuum by the

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acceptance of the meanings associated with it wipes out the possibility of a middle ground. Moreover, in a hyper-masculinized society such as ours, the feminizing and hence disempowering associations with the color pink should not be minimized either.110 This way of thinking stands in stark contrast to the line of thought developed by Roosevelt in his renomination speech in 1936 when he reminded his audience that “[a]n old English judge once said: ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.” As cognitive linguist George Lakoff points out in his book Moral Politics, “to use the other side’s words is to accept their framing of the issues.”111 In the cause of self-preservation, liberals should have been working hard to find different language to reframe the discourse. The issue is exacerbated by the fact that by the early 1950s the institution of property as such had achieved full hegemonic status in the sense that it was completely uncontested in mainstream political discourse; this is attested to by the fact that—as the letters of ordinary Americans like these students show—property, this most explosive of social institutions, had passed utterly beyond the realm of general discussion—except by a conservative like Homer G. Richey who was urging more privatization. Here what may be obvious must, nonetheless, be emphasized: property has a cultural meaning that goes beyond the mere concept of ownership; it was over the issue of property rights that the civil and political rights of individuals were hammered out throughout Anglo-American history. Through this historical process, as Jennifer Nedelsky argues in her study of early constitutional positions, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism, property has acquired in the classical liberal tradition a hallowed status as a core symbol of the autonomy of the individual, i.e., freedom, liberty, and all the other words invoked by most Americans when they think of what their country means to them. Therefore, a position on property that is anything less than absolute renders the holder of such a view open to assault on the basis of his or her allegiance to liberty, freedom, etc. On the other hand, to more radical leftists property is the core symbol and vehicle of oppression of the many by the few; therefore, the fact that liberals respect the principle of property at all opens them to hostility from the left. With property functioning not only as a powerful symbol of the rights of the individual, but as the individual’s cell wall, so to speak, the ambiguity of liberals vis-à-vis property is, at a deeper level, reflective of their ambiguous position with regard to the relationship between the individual and society. In the 1950s the most influential model was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s notion of the Vital Center. In his book by that title, Schlesinger borrowed a theoretical structure first proposed by De Witt C. Poole112 to lay out the relative positions of freedom and totalitarianism. According

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to Poole, right and left should be conceived not in terms of a line but in terms of a circle divided into four quadrants by a vertical line representing property and a horizontal line representing liberty. The top of the circle is marked “Gradualism” while the bottom is marked “Violence.” With these parameters in place the upper left quadrant then is occupied by liberalism, the lower left by communism, the upper right by conservatism, and the lower right by fascism. The idea is to put liberalism and communism on one side of the vertical line of property while conservatism and fascism are together on the other side, but then to put liberalism and conservatism on the same side of the horizontal line of liberty while communism and fascism occupy the other half of the circle.113 Clearly the relationship between property and liberty is central to this diagram, yet Schlesinger never explains that relationship, nor is it selfexplanatory. Does the fact that liberals sit on the left with the communists imply that liberals, like communists, would do away with private property while the liberal position on the “gradualism” side of the liberty line implies that they would do so gradually and peacefully? Doesn’t that make liberals into social democrats instead of liberals? Moreover, this diagram does not put liberals in the “Vital Center” but in a quadrant; liberals are in the center in terms of the horizontal continuum, which we already discussed in terms of red/white, but in this circular arrangement they are recast as left/right. In effect, since liberals have a compromise position on the issue of property, “center” and “pink” are synonymous. To be “pure white” would be to hold to an absolute view of private property that would allow of no public ownership of anything—roads, oceans, streams, rivers, air, let alone institutions such as the postal service, public schools, etc. (all under some degree of pressure today). Nedelsky pinpoints what is at issue, i.e., that the core of the notion of liberty in the liberal tradition is individual autonomy protected from the “intrusion and oppression of the collective,” an autonomy that needs to be protected by “erecting a wall of rights between the individual and those around him.” In other words, while the rights of private property seemingly concern our relationship to things, those rights actually concern our relationship to each other. Nedelsky goes on to argue that property is “the ideal symbol for this vision of autonomy, for it could both literally and figuratively provide the necessary walls.” However, property is a symbol of separation; consequently “the most perfectly autonomous man is the most perfectly isolated,”114 that is, the completely unsocial person. What this reasoning brings out, then, is that the underlying and defining issue in matters of property is the correct relationship between individuals and society. This, in turn, speaks to the definition of “individual” and the definition of “society.” In embracing Poole’s diagram, Schlesinger failed to grasp (1) that property is not an inert thing that can be portrayed as a constant but rather a social construction with different meanings in different systems at different times

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and (2) that the real, the critical, difference between the extremes of right and left is their antagonistic positions vis-à-vis the ontological status of the individual and of society.115 American conservatism in the 1950s, in contrast, offered a worldview that was a curious amalgam of mutually incompatible ontologies, most prominently atomistic individualism, nationalism, and Christianity. The Enlightenment assumption inherent in the notions of the state of nature and the classical social contract assumed the indivisible reality of the individual, giving the individual precedence in both time and importance over society. With no empirical evidence available as to the nature of the earliest human existence, it is striking that Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau simply assumed that the original state of humanity was one of many individual, solitary, selfinterested existences—the state of nature—and this mythology was passed down to influential succeeding thinkers like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Herbert Spencer, and William Graham Sumner. James Bonar wrote in his Preface to the Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Malthus, 1810–1823, Ricardo had a fixed idea of the individual as being logically prior to society; and the interest of the community only meant to him the interest of a large number of individuals, the collection as a whole having no qualities not possessed by each of the parts, and there being no spiritual bond. Nature (which means in this case theory instead of history) begins and ends with individuals; Nature made the individuals, and Man made the groups. Ricardo agreed with Bentham that “the community is a fictitious Body, composed of individual persons who are considered as constituting, as it were, its Members. The interest of the community then is what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.” We find Ricardo arguing: “Let me know what the state of men’s interests is, and I will tell you what measures they will recommend;” and “that State is most perfect in which all sanctions concur to make it the interest of all men to be virtuous,” in other words, to promote the general happiness. According to this hypothesis, primordially people lived individually, not socially, and they were completely free inasmuch as freedom meant the ability to do what they wanted when they wanted; however, the weaker suffered from the aggression of the stronger. Government, then, was invented to protect, according to Hobbes, people from each other, while, in the thinking of the more influential Locke, also protecting the “natural rights” of life, liberty, and property. And, as Spencer asserted, “This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less; it ought not to be allowed to do more.”116 William Graham Sumner agreed wholeheartedly, writing, “What we mean by liberty is civil liberty,

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or liberty under law; and this means the guarantees of law that a man shall not be interfered with while using his own powers for his own welfare.”117 Spencer, who, in a letter collected in The Man Versus the State, imagined a state of nature along Hobbesian lines, was explicit in setting out the view of society from the viewpoint of atomistic individualism, writing that “[v]iewed philosophically, a community is a body of men associated together for mutual defence.”118 More recently, England’s former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher demonstrated modern conservatism’s continuity with that earlier understanding, famously denying that there is such a thing as society at all.119 So when the person who holds these views considers the best possible results of an action or a transaction, he or she considers the best possible results for themselves—their neighbors can look after themselves. Since the atomistic individualist only acknowledges the real existence of the thing, i.e., the individual, he/she also can only acknowledge oneto-one relationships. If we follow the logic of the ontological assertion, however, even those are in danger; digging deeper, atomistic individualism leads logically to a sort of socio-economic solipsism: if only the individual exists, then a complete subjectivity on the part of each individual is the only viewpoint that makes sense—to take a wider view or, for that matter, merely to acknowledge the existence of “other” is to place oneself and others into some kind of relationship that annihilates the integrity of one’s separateness. That acknowledgement would mean that the state of being “in relationship to” is real, which would mean that society could have a real existence. Subjectively then, only one individual—oneself—can really exist. This version of reality has logical problems and perhaps, for those who see and choose to exploit them, political vulnerabilities as well. First of all, it denies the sociability of human beings, the fact that, for the most part, along with the fact that we are physically ill-equipped to survive as solitary creatures, we seem to like being with others and get lonely when we are not. Moreover, there does not appear to have been any time that humans have been human and have, in fact, lived predominantly as solitary animals. And why should this be a source of surprise? Wolves, baboons, chimpanzees, dolphins, ants, bees, and many others are all social creatures without requiring any of the supposedly unique characteristics of human beings to maintain that sociability and the order of their respective societies. With the element of the temporal precedence of the individual removed, the relationship between the individual and the collective changes from an evolution to a dialectical antinomy (which, if true, since an antinomy represents polarity, also invalidates Schlesinger/Poole’s circular representation). Moreover, since conservatism only acknowledges the real existence of the individual, it cannot, as Mrs. Thatcher’s remark implies, consistently acknowledge the existence of groups as such. For this reason, nationalism

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is inconsistent with atomistic individualism, and logically one or the other of these has no place in the conservative worldview. However, modern conservatives have embraced nationalism as an integral part of their worldview. The awkwardness of this inconsistency is illustrated by a speech Calvin Coolidge gave in 1924 in which he sought to reconcile individualism with nationalism. He began by saying that “Patriotism is easy to understand in America. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.”120 This statement is logically consistent with the basic premise of radical individualism, i.e., that only individuals actually exist; loyalty to one’s country is, therefore, an expedient means to serve oneself. However, this obliterates the rationale for self-sacrifice of any kind. Why risk dying in battle for one’s country when one’s attachment to that nation is based only on its ability to serve oneself (and indeed, the young John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and William Graham Sumner made precisely that calculation, opting to pay others to go in their place during the Civil War)? Perhaps one might die to save one’s family and loved ones. However, this implies a connection based on something other than the market version of self-interest, love of another, in fact. In any case, Coolidge himself undercuts the case for individualism when, later in the same speech, he says, “Patriotism does not mean a regard for some special section or an attachment for some special interest, and a narrow prejudice against other sections and other interests; it means a love of the whole country.”121 In addition, the calls during times of war for young men and women to put their lives on the line for their country (“Uncle Sam needs you!”) imply that in the nationalist ideology, the nation is the ultimate entity, more important than any individual. But on the basis of radical individualism, there can be no such thing as “the whole country” and no reason for giving such an entity’s well-being preference to one’s own. Needless to say, this would be an awkward acknowledgement for any politician or political party to make. On the other hand, if the nation can exist as a real collective entity, then so can society or any other collective entity, and the fundamental premise of the individualistic, marketbased aspect of conservatism is exploded. Yet another contradictory element in modern conservatism is its dedication to unregulated or minimally regulated markets. Markets are consistent with individualism inasmuch as they are international institutions in which individuals can pursue their own interest without regard to the benefit of others, but this pursuit of self-interest can occur quite possibly— and legitimately according to the ideology embedded in market relations— at the expense of the nation. So, again, the market ideology only obliges one to care about oneself, while nationalism obliges one to care about a particular type of group: one’s nation. Finally, the values of Christianity, an important element in modern American conservatism (the key contrast in Joe McCarthy’s 1950 speech in Wheeling, VA, that launched his career as a prominent right-wing

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anticommunist was between the “democratic Christian world and the communistic atheistic world”), are inconsistent with atomistic individualism and its emphasis on self-interest. However one takes it, it is a stretch and takes a considerable amount of explaining to get from “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”122 to market rules that are entirely predicated on self-interest, which, if allowed to operate unimpeded, will—according to Smithean theory—incidentally work for the weal of all, no good will required. So in American conservatism as it had evolved in the 20th century, we find at least three different systems of logic, based on three different and mutually contradictory premises—the self as ultimately real, the nation as ultimately real, and the Christian deity and His moral order as ultimately real—wrapped up into a remarkably untidy package labeled “American conservatism” that purports to be a single thing, an ideology. However, as historian Alan Brinkley has noted, conservatism is not “‘an ideology,’ with a secure and consistent internal structure,” but is rather a “cluster of related (and sometimes unrelated) ideas from which those who consider themselves conservatives draw different elements at different times.” And, he goes on to say, it is just this “ideological juggling” that makes the American right “particularly baffling to those historians who . . . try to make sense of it.”123 The extremes contained in individualism and nationalism, while drastic in their implications and characterized by enormous internal inconsistencies, attract adherents because of a seeming conceptual simplicity (a simple appeal to the rights and self-interest of the individual or a similarly simple appeal to patriotism) and a seeming coherence. This is only possible because individual people unconsciously tend to be bearers of multiple, mutually incompatible ideologies. From a position in the center, liberals of the 1950s might have been able to critique each extreme as unreasonable, but, despite Schlesinger’s efforts or the more abstruse thinking of John Dewey, they had no clear cut, politically workable theory of the relationship between the individual and the group (or the individual and other individuals for that matter), and so, of course, they could have no explanation of the role of liberalism in expressing such a relationship. This means that while in domestic politics the political right can always come back to the values of possessive individualism (in which case communism or, in quieter times, government comes to represent the threat represented to the individual by the collective), liberals are rhetorically at a disadvantage since—as exemplified by Hall, Heilig, Sullivan, Gerson, and others’ expressions of concern regarding the tendency of the right to lump liberals with communists—they must always defend a position regarding property (symbolic of the individual) and government (symbolic

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of the collective) that has no easily identifiable foundation. Speaking at the University of Connecticut in 1952, Max Lerner defined liberalism as “freedom plus groceries plus the adherence to the concept of the open mind.” Though attractively humane and commonsensical, this definition begs the question of where money to pay for the groceries is to come from. The answer, of course, is that, when necessary, it will come from the government, which will get it from taxes, which in turn come from the property of other individuals. Lerner strove to identify liberals squarely with individualism, saying, “The annihilation of the individual is the mark of the totalitarian mind”; however, by failing to make a popular—that is to say, not academic—challenge to the Lockean proposition that untrammeled rights of property are a necessary support for individualism and freedom, and by failing to make a popular argument that stressed that individuals can only survive as such through social values that connect them to each other, and, finally, by failing to make a popular argument that every individual has a vital stake in such connections, in the political arena Lerner and other liberals left the basic premises of the political right intact and left themselves open to being judged on the basis of those premises.124

Notes 1. Whitney Griswold, “Survival Is Not Enough,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1951, reprinted in Griswold, Essays on Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 11–25. 2. The Cavalier Daily, April 17, 1951, 2. 3. Ibid. 4. The university was not coeducational yet, so it is safe to presume that PMC was male. 5. The Cavalier Daily, April 19, 1951, 2. 6. Ibid. 7. The Cavalier Daily, April 21, 1951, 2. 8. Ibid. 9. The Cavalier Daily, April 24, 1951, 2. 10. The Cavalier Daily, April 25, 1951, 2. 11. Ibid. Of course, it was only after 1917 that Lenin’s antidemocratic interpretation of Marx (soon to be called “communism”) became more than an outlying point of view in the world of socialist thought. 12. The Cavalier Daily, April 26, 1951, 2. 13. The Cavalier Daily, April 28, 1951, 2. 14. I have searched high and low for any classical or mythological person or creature called Cerebrus, and the closest I know of is Cerberus, the threeheaded dog that guards Hades. However, in the newspaper (except when it occasionally appears as “Cerebus”) and in the university archives, the name that appears is invariably Cerebrus, and since it was never corrected, Cerebrus it shall be. 15. The Cavalier Daily, April 28, 1951, 2. 16. Ibid. 17. The Cavalier Daily, May 1, 1951, 2.

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18. Here Richey shows his ignorance of the conditions of the Marshall Plan, which were carefully crafted to guarantee its aid being refused by the Soviet Union while giving the appearance of including all of Europe. 19. The Cavalier Daily, May 1, 1951, 2. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. The Cavalier Daily, May 2, 1951, 1. 23. The Cavalier Daily, May 3, 1951, 2. 24. The Cavalier Daily, May 5, 1951, 2. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. The Cavalier Daily, May 9, 1951, 2. 28. Report of Committee on Foreign Affairs, May 8, 1951, Papers of the President, Accession #RG-2/1/2.631, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va. (Hereafter PP). 29. Homer G. Richey, “Biographica Philosophica,” ca. 1993, Homer G. Richey Papers, 1951, #12709-b, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va. (Hereafter HRP). 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Report of Committee on Foreign Affairs, May 8, 1951, PP. 33. Homer G. Richey, Aide Memoire to Robert K. Gooch, February 11, 1948, HRP. 34. Fernbach Testimony, Board of Visitor Minutes, September 13, 1951, HRP. 35. Lieutenant Colonel, Stanley J. Leland to Colonel Hardy C. Dillard, March 1, 1946, HRP. 36. Homer G. Richey to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., April 15, 1948, HRP. 37. Board of Visitors Minutes, June 7, 1951, HRP. 38. John Gange to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., April 15, 1948, HRP. 39. Homer G. Richey, “Special Broadcast on Washington’s Birthday,” February 2, 1951, HRP. 40. Homer G. Richey, Radio Broadcast, March 27, 1951, HRP. 41. John Gange to Homer G. Richey, November 29, 1950, PP. 42. There is a discrepancy here between the copy of this paragraph in Richey’s transcript, which reads “pinko,” and that in the president’s papers, which acknowledges the “pinko” in the Homer G. Richey file but says that the word “pinks” was “the wording used in the broadcast.” HRP, PP. 43. Homer G. Richey, Radio Broadcast, February 6, 1951, HRP, PP. 44. Homer G. Richey to John S. Battle, February 2, 1951, HRP. 45. William M. Tuck to Homer G. Richey, February 5, 1951, HRP. 46. Homer G. Richey to William M. Tuck, February 6, 1951, HRP. 47. The Rector and Visitors serve as the corporate board for the University of Virginia, and are responsible for the long-term planning of the university. Officially, the University of Virginia is incorporated as The Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. 48. John Gange to Homer G. Richey, February 26, 1951, HRP. 49. In Truman’s inaugural address (January 20, 1949) he proposed four foreign policy objectives, the last of which—point four—was a program for economic aid to poor countries. 50. The Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) implemented Roosevelt’s US Executive Order 8802, requiring that companies with government contracts not discriminate on the basis of race or religion. In 1948, along with anti-lynching legislation, and the abolishment of the poll tax, Truman called for a permanent FEPC, but though it passed the House, the bill failed in the Senate.

Homer G. Richey and the Power of a Symbol 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

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Homer G. Richey to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., February 28, 1951, HRP. Colgate W. Darden, Jr. to Homer G. Richey, February 12, 1951, HRP. Homer G. Richey to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., February 24, 1951, PP. Colgate W. Darden, Jr. to Homer G. Richey, February 26, 1951, HRP. Frank Porter Graham (1886–1972) was the president of the University of North Carolina campus at Chapel Hill and also the first president of the consolidated state university. He was a liberal on racial matters, bringing prominent African Americans such as the poet Langston Hughes to speak on the Chapel Hill campus and serving on Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights. Previously, he had been an adviser to Roosevelt on New Deal legislation. In 1949, North Carolina’s progressive governor W. Kerr Scott appointed Graham to the US Senate to replace Senator J. Melville Broughton, who had died in office, and when Graham faced reelection in 1950, conservatives ran an openly racist campaign against him. Graham won a plurality but not a majority in the primary against Willis Smith, and when he faced Smith again in a runoff, Smith won the runoff election by a narrow vote, 51 to 49 percent. See Julian M. Pleasants and August M. Burns, Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). For the Miller/Battle campaign, see Peter R. Henriques, “The Organization Challenged: John S. Battle, Francis P. Miller, and Horace Edwards Run for Governor in 1949,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 82, no. 3 (July 1974): 372–406. Richey apparently either was unaware of Keynesian economics or had such contempt for it that he deemed it not worthy of mention. Homer G. Richey to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., February 28, 1951, HRP and PP. Time Magazine, “National Affairs: They Hate Ike,” May 5, 1952. Joseph P. Kamp to Homer G. Richey, March 7, 1951, HRP. Paul F. Kinnucan to Richard Vail, March 15, 1951, HRP. Ivey F. Lewis to Homer G. Richey, April 14, 1951, PP. Homer G. Richey to Ivey F. Lewis, April 18, 1951, HRP. John Tritz to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., April 19, 1951, PP. Colgate W. Darden, Jr. to Tritz, PP. Homer G. Richey to Barron Foster Black, April 26, 1951, HRP. Homer G. Richey Petition to the Board of Visitors, April 25, 1951, PP. In his own handwritten marginal notes on his copy of the report Richey writes: “John Gange’s words at Colonnade Club: ‘Homer, I’ve done good deal of soul searching on this question, and I can honestly say that your political views have had nothing to do with my recommendations.’” Report of Committee on Foreign Affairs’, May 8, 1951, HRP. Report of Committee on Foreign Affairs, May 8, 1951, HRP and PP. Very little of what follows and of the details of subsequent meetings comes from the official minutes of the Board of Visitor meetings since it was resolved in a May 9 meeting “that the record of the hearings on the petition of Homer G. Richey, which hearings took place on May 11, June 7, July 12 and September 13, 1951, not be spread in full on the permanent Minute Book, but that the record of these hearings be made a part of the minutes by reference.” However, Homer G. Richey acquired and kept the full record, and it is extant in his papers. Oak Ridge, located in eastern Tennessee, was established in the early 1940s as a base for the Manhattan Project—the US government operation that developed the atomic bomb. Owen Lattimore was a Far East scholar who was a principal target of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the 1950s. John K. Fairbank taught at Harvard

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73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

Homer G. Richey and the Power of a Symbol and was among the so-called China Hands who predicted the victory of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party and advocated establishing relations with the new government. Minutes of the Board of Visitors, May 11, 1951, HRP. John T. Flynn was a journalist, an opponent of the New Deal, and also one of the founders of the America First Committee. In 1949 he published The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution dealing with what he feared would be a coming socialist state. Homer G. Richey Broadcast May 15, 1951, HRP. Homer G. Richey Broadcast No. 28, May 22, 1951, HRP. Robert F. Kennedy graduated from the University of Virginia Law School in 1951, and I have often wondered if he might have been “Cerebrus.” However, I have not been able to find any evidence to confirm this. From 1937 to 1944, Duggan was the chief of the Division of American Republics Affairs, which oversaw diplomatic relations with Central and South America. He was mentioned in Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony as a Soviet spy, an accusation that was subsequently supported by the Venona papers. Leo Pasvolsky (August 22, 1893–May 5, 1953) was a journalist, economist, state department official, and personal assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Director of International Studies at the Brookings Institution. He was one of the United States government’s main planners for the post World War II world and one of the authors of the UN Charter. Homer G. Richey singled out Pasvolsky for a barrage of insinuations concerning his loyalty in a May 29, 1951, broadcast, insinuations that ranged from the fact that Pasvolsky was Russian born to the fact that he was an architect of the United Nations to the fact that Alger Hiss had worked under him in 1944 when Pasvolsky was the first head of the Office of Special Political Affairs It is a curious fact that Acheson was not an admirer of Pasvolsky, writing of him in a denigrating way in his memoir, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. The relevant thought here might be that if association constitutes proof of guilt in the mental world of the McCarthyist, shouldn’t dissociation be accepted as evidence at least of innocence? Then we have the further question: who is innocent? Acheson or Pasvolsky? See Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 55 and 64. Board of Visitors minutes, June 7, 1951, HRP. Joseph M. Hartfield to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., June 11, 1951, PP. Michael D. Barone, “Harry Byrd’s Virginia,” The Harvard Crimson, November 16, 1965, 1. Colgate W. Darden, Jr. to Jesse H. Jones, June 14, 1951, PP. John Gange testimony to Board of Visitors, July 12, 1951, HRP. Homer G. Richey to Mary Stalcup Markward, August 27, 1951, HRP. Homer G. Richey notes on Washington Time-Herald article, August 27, 1951, HRP. Senator Byrd was confused about the identity of the person involved: Homer B. Richey, Homer G. Richey’s father, was a lawyer. Paul Linebarger was professor of Asiatic Politics at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Micaud and Fernbach testimony to Board of Visitors, September 13, 1951, HRP. John Thomas Flynn (October 25, 1882–April 13, 1964) was a right-wing American journalist, prominent in his opposition to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Flynn was adamantly against American entry into World War II and, in September 1940, helped establish the America First Committee.

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92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

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He also was the first to accuse the Roosevelt administration of having had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Francis James Westbrook Pegler (August 2, 1894–June 24, 1969) was another far right columnist in the 1930s and 1940s, like Flynn, known for his opposition to the New Deal and labor unions. John Gange testimony before Board of Visitors, September 13, 1951, HRP. Statement of the Board of Visitors, September 14, 1951, PP. Deans of the University to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., September 15, 1951, PP. John Gange to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., September 15, 1951, PP. Colgate W. Darden, Jr. to Homer G. Richey, September 17, 1951, HRP. Homer G. Richey to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., September 17, 1951, PP. Homer G. Richey to Barron F. Black, September 22, 1951, HRP. Eustace Mullins to Colgate W. Darden, Jr., September 18, 1951, PP. Colgate W. Darden, Jr. to Eustace Mullins, September, PP. The Cavalier Daily, September 19, 1951, 2. The Cavalier Daily, January 12, 1952, 1. Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 10. Friedrich August Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Oxford: George Routledge & Sons, 1944), 108. Also, for the story of business support for Hayek and von Mises, see Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 34–52. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part 1 and Selections from Parts 2 and 3, C. J. Arthur, ed. (New York: International Publishers, 2004), 53. Therefore, we find the liberal editorialists of The Connecticut Campus anxiously commenting about a “world of growing apprehension when liberal ideas are suspected of disloyalty” or about the fact that “today . . . to many people, the word ‘liberal’ becomes synonymous with dissention, radicalism, or action to destroy, when to our way of thinking its connotation cannot rightly be carried beyond that of an open mind, a willingness to listen to ideas.” Connecticut Campus, April 13, 1948, 2, and March 12, 1948, 2. Mentioned in Chadwick Hall, “America’s Conservative Revolution,” The Antioch Review 15, no. 2 (Summer 1955): 204–216. Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 5. Ibid., 18. For a thorough discussion of homosexuality, the sexual anxieties of the 1950s, and their relationship to the red scare, see Chapter 2 “Anti-Communism on the Right: The Politics of Perversion” in K. A. Cuordileone’s, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge and Taylor & Francis Group, 2005). George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 419. De Witt Clinton Poole (1885–1952) was an American diplomat, educator, and sometime spymaster. “DeWitt Poole Dies: Retired Diplomat,” The New York Times, September 4, 1952. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949), 145. Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 272. This truth of this is reinforced by the words of Suzanne Silvercruys Stevenson of the right-wing group the Minute Women, who boasted that “We work for unadulterated individualism.” That she does not mention issues of property is significant, not because it shows that property is not the issue

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120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

Homer G. Richey and the Power of a Symbol while individualism is, but rather because it shows how much for granted the dependence of the existence of the individual on property is taken by people of the far right. Mrs. Stevenson’s associations, as exposed by Hall, constitute a convincing demonstration that democratic principles were secondary in her thinking. Connecticut Campus, March 21, 1952, 1. Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State, with Six Essays on Government, Society and Freedom, ed. Eric Mack, introduction by Albert Jay Nock (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1981), 187. William Graham Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, ed. Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914). Spencer, 221. One might wonder whether any form of government or human association other than perhaps the family is an unacceptable attempt to tamper with nature’s laws. Actually, Thatcher said that “[t]here is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” Woman’s Own, October 31, 1987. Why families—simply a smaller unit of association—should be accorded more reality than society is unclear. Calvin Coolidge, The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1924), 333. Ibid., 348. Matthew 22:37–40 and 7:12. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 281. Connecticut Campus, March 21, 1952, 1, 5.

4

Mapping the Liberal Mind Paul Wilson Sullivan

Introduction In previous chapters we have seen liberals consistently on the defensive. Even when striking back successfully at McCarthyist attacks—easier to do within the at least somewhat protected walls of academia than outside them—they are always rebutting, never asserting. The ground belongs to and the terms of battle are dictated by the radical right. The obvious question is why? The stock answers point to the times: the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons, the “loss” of China, the onset of the Korean War, etc. And, to be sure, these were formidable influences. Yet, with the success of New Deal liberalism in bringing Americans to unprecedented heights of prosperity, one might wonder why liberals never managed to strike a counter blow, to bring the fight to the conservatives, putting them on the defensive. Is it possible that there is something intrinsic to the liberal worldview that made it so, that crippled liberals and rendered them incapable of taking the offensive? That is the possibility that we will explore in this and the next chapter. To start, we will take an in depth look at a single liberal thinker, Paul Wilson Sullivan, and try to map out his mind, so to speak, to see first, what were his basic beliefs—his beliefs about life, about meaning, about humanity—and then to see how those extended into his thinking and responses to the political challenges of the period. Overall, we will see that his innermost conviction was that reason is the road to truth and that the purpose of political discourse is to persuade, not to destroy; this left him and liberals like him ill-equipped to counter an attack that had little to do with persuasion and much to do with destruction. The following chapter will build on this discussion and explore the liberal position in the abstract to see both more broadly and more deeply into its implications and its structural weaknesses in responding to the “war by other means.”

Metaphysical Underpinnings Paul Wilson Sullivan was a student at the University of New Hampshire and a regular columnist for The New Hampshire during the early 1950s. Between November 12, 1953, and March 29, 1955, he wrote some 28

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opinion pieces on topics ranging from domestic politics to foreign policy to political theory to metaphysics. His writings show clearly that he was reading many of the prominent public intellectuals of the day—people like John Dewey, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Sidney Hook—and was working hard to digest their ideas into what turned out to be a reasonably coherent worldview. His writings represent a sort of compendium of common liberal themes, attitudes, ideas, and beliefs including pragmatism and philosophical and moral relativism, and for this reason they provide a valuable basis for an effort to understand just what it meant to be a liberal in the mid-1950s. Briefly Sullivan’s worldview can be summed up as follows: the creation of intellectually autonomous individuals and the maintenance of the wellbeing of those individuals are the goals of what Sullivan terms a “decent” society. In light of the challenges of physical and social existence, to attain this state of well-being, various social actions must be undertaken. For those actions to be successful in fulfilling their goal (the well-being of human beings), they must be in accord with what is real, what is true. The first and critical step, then, in undertaking beneficial actions is to understand reality, truth, for only when one understands how something works can one use or affect it. Ignorance, especially close-minded ignorance, whether based on prejudice or deceit, then, is the chief obstacle to the attainment of human well-being inasmuch as the sine qua non for progress is an unbiased understanding of reality. It should be noted, and is probably obvious, that this is a view that is thoroughly predicated on principles dating back to the Enlightenment, principles that privilege reason as the great human faculty, which if applied to the natural and social worlds will produce better lives for human beings. This is also the view that has dominated liberal thought from the time of Locke through the present day. Because of their (for a college student) comprehensive nature, Sullivan’s writings stand out in their usefulness for exploring the worldview of the intellectual liberal non-specialist of the early 1950s.1

The Good Life Sullivan does not give a great deal of space to positive descriptions of what he might conceive to be a good life, but we can make inferences from scattered remarks in his articles. For example, in an affectionate retrospective of Harry Truman’s presidency published on October 28, 1954, we find praise for Truman’s “courageous fight for civil rights, his defense of minority groups, his opposition to un-American immigration policies . . . his defense of civilian authority.” Sullivan also lauds the programs of the Fair Deal, specifying Truman’s sponsorship of low-cost housing, national health care, and assistance for farmers. All these put Sullivan squarely in the camp of the New/Fair Deal liberal, though they don’t tell us anything beyond that. We can get further insight into what Sullivan believed from

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his occasional descriptions of what he considers to be the misspent life. He has only contempt for the life of what he sees as the stereotypical bourgeois American. In one essay he portrays a person emerging from a sort of life trance: You wake up at fifty, and suddenly your golf course becomes dull; your cocktail parties become a bore, attended by people who talk too much, too fast, and seem overpowered by the idea of spending a single moment by themselves. The utter vacuity of a life lived without thought, without art, without poetry, without love, and without principle comes crashing in and too late you find that security is not happiness, but your mind is unequipped to enjoy the leisure it has earned.2 Clearly, this imagined somebody is undergoing a full-fledged midlife crisis. From this list of negatives, we can deduce what the corresponding positives would be. In contrast to the aforementioned wasted life, the positive life would be one that would include art, poetry, love, and principles. A very young, and doubtless single, man, at first glance Sullivan seems to rate security low on the list of life’s good things. What matters to him, what he conceives to be worthwhile, is clearly the “lived life” and the opportunity and appropriate conditions to live such a life. However, we would make a mistake in seeing him as an idealist divorced from the material realities of life. In a discussion of foreign affairs, he notes that for the US, “[o]ur greatest enemies are not Moscow, but the poverty, hunger, disease and oppression on which Moscow bases its appeal.”3 So at least a moderate prosperity that includes sufficient nutrition and good health can be included in the list of life’s good things. In yet another piece he approvingly notes that pacifists believe that “[l]ove, nonviolence and good have vast and proven power to change people and situations.”4 So, peaceful and loving relations among people and peoples can be added to the list of desirables. Taking all this together, we might begin to suspect that Sullivan has a somewhat more sophisticated notion of the “good life” than first appeared. After all, those headed for the horror of lives filled with golf and cocktail parties (and I do not make this comment altogether facetiously) are Sullivan’s fellow college students, who presumably come from sufficiently affluent conditions to ensure most of them a moderate prosperity along with decent food and access to a doctor. In fact, the absence of “the poverty, hunger, disease and oppression” might be considered to be the only foundation on which the house of a life devoted to life’s finer things can be built. However, material security, though a necessary supporting condition for the good life, is not a sufficient condition for its existence. Those who consider it to be so are doomed to a life of “utter vacuity” because it will be a life lived for material rewards alone. To be fully human

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then—or perhaps we might be better advised to use the phrase “to fulfill one’s humanity”—and to experience well-being, we must exercise the faculties that bring aesthetics (art and poetry), love, and rationality (principles) into our lives. Which brings us to the next question we must consider, which is when we say “all human beings,” precisely what is meant?

Liberal Individualism This question takes us to the very vitals of what constitutes the dilemma of modern liberalism. “All human beings” could figure into a class analysis of society; Marxism, after all, ultimately champions all human beings inasmuch as it looks to a classless world in which all will have a sufficiency of life’s necessities and none will suffer the pain of alienation from their own productive activity. Liberalism, however, in all its forms (and in this context both modern liberals and conservatives must be classified as liberals) is concerned with individuals, and Sullivan fits into this classification as well. For one thing, he states baldly that “[t]he individual is the ultimate unit of existence” and also holds “the individual to be the end of society as of existence.”5 These two statements are particularly compelling, for one is an ontological assertion while the other is teleological. The question then arises, “What is this ‘individual’”? Here Sullivan, insofar as he directly addresses the issue, falls squarely into a Deweyan mold, writing that “[i]n one sense there are no individuals. There are only men who are nothing except as they live and move within a collective social structure, powerless without the instruments of the species,” going even further elsewhere, adding the observation that there is a “sense in which ‘self’ is an illusion, for we are all products of society; inheritors of its traditions, economy and biological evolution.” Elsewhere with regard to the same issue, he makes direct reference to Dewey, attributing to him a “denial of individual intelligence or meaning, stating that men can know and do nothing except in association.”6 And, just for good measure, he throws in the reminder that “‘[n]o man,’ the poet Donne tells us, ‘is an island entire of itself.’” And in an essay entitled “The Liberal Function” Wilson explicitly lines himself up with Dewey, writing, “I believe it would be correct to say that the liberal today functions broadly within the tradition of [Thomas Hill] Green and Dewey.”7 Given all this, it might be well to consider Dewey’s analysis of ontological status of the individual from his 1920 work, Reconstruction in Philosophy. Discussing the social thought of the “individualistic school” of the 18th and 19th centuries, Dewey puts his finger directly on its core belief, i.e., “the belief that individuals are alone real” and that “classes and organizations are secondary and derived.” If only the individual is real, then he/she is “regarded as something given, something already there,” entire of itself, so to speak, and not subject to either addition or subtraction in any essential sense.

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Dewey rejects this view. He grants that the individual may be “an original datum,” but only in the “physical sense of physical bodies that to the sense are separate.” In any more articulated, meaningful sense, individuality is a social product. In fact, the term “individual” does not denote “one thing but is a blanket term for the immense variety of specific reactions, habits, dispositions and powers of human nature that are evoked, and confirmed under the influences of associated life.” Social institutions create individuals with whatever capacity for “initiative, inventiveness, varied resourcefulness, assumption of responsibility in choice of belief and conduct” they may have. Moreover, to the extent that individuals have these qualities, they “are not gifts, but achievements.”8 What we have, then, is a complex and seemingly paradoxical relationship between the individual and society; as Sullivan writes, though the individual is “the ultimate unit of existence,” “the ultimate unit of social structure,” if we look into this “unit” we find a complex, a vessel that gains significance only through being a bearer of tradition, culture, and language. This means that there is no practical value or even sense in discussing individuals in isolation. Relationship is everything. As Sullivan states it, “Your life is important, but only as it contributes to a larger human experience.”9 The relationship of individuals to society, then, is critical because society is both the source and the result of individuality. One of the books Sullivan read with hearty approbation was William Ernest Hocking’s 1937 volume The Lasting Elements of Individualism. Sullivan’s concern was primarily Hocking’s treatment of the individual and the state, a matter of particular urgency, Sullivan notes, for “an age that has produced Stalin and Hitler.”10 The term “the state” is not equivalent to the term “society,” although it represents an aspect of society. Reacting against Mussolinian style language characterizing the state as “a single organism with a mind and will of its own,” Sullivan quotes Hocking’s assertion that the individual “is mentally prior to the state”11 and that “[t]he state exists for individuals, not they for it.” Then the discourse moves away from any assertion of the real existence of collective forms, stating that “[t]here is, in literal truth, no public mind: there are only the minds of the persons composing the public.” However, again the liberal trend of thought is away from human “thingness” since individuality “is not ‘a fixed membership as of an organ in an organism’ but ‘a continued tension between various possibilities of belonging.’” The emphasis throughout, then, is on relationship, which means fundamentally on connectedness and patterns of connectedness. It is interesting, then, that liberals like Sullivan put such a strong emphasis on the necessity to be an individual, to be willing to go one’s own way apart from “the herd.” The reasoning here derives from Sullivan’s notion of the relationship between human beings and the environment within which they function, i.e., reality.

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The Nature of Reality In Sullivan’s articles a hazy picture emerges of a reality that seems to be absolute. He rejects dualisms of all sorts, finding it impossible to find “division in a universe in which 90 odd elements are common to all essence.” The findings of science seem to lead him to a “monistic concept of the universe as a single mass of energy, differentiated only in combinations and patterns.” If this is true, the existence of “[a] mass of energy differentiated only in pattern, whether sparrow, man, rock, thought, or tree, suggests a natural identity of all existence, a view encouraged by science in its theories of mutation and the uncreatedness and indestructibility of matter.”12 He finds another word for this reality: God. This he describes as “the creative, active Universe, not moving ‘through’ energy, but energy itself, internally not externally moved.”13 Sullivan’s God is a “God of immanence and transcendence.” God is transcendent inasmuch as it is beyond humanity (“To me God in human form, or even limited by human attributes is no God at all, for infinite totality is thus reduced to finite part”) but immanent inasmuch as “[w]e are wrong when we look outward for God, for then we look too far. God is everywhere, around and within us, in our heartbeat, in a grain of sand.” This God is a “God of creative force” with certain definable attributes inasmuch as it is a “bundle of behavior traits organized to act in a certain way.” And although not a personal God in the traditional sense, deity, according to Sullivan’s thought, is “not indifferent at all because, like all traditional gods, ‘He’ is a supplier of human needs.”14 Given the existence of an absolute reality, that means that inescapably a fundamental challenge to humanity is to determine its relationship to that absolute reality. On the one hand, Sullivan seems to see God (the universe) as being friendly since “‘He’ is a supplier of human needs.” On the other hand, “the universe itself is not ordered by human values.”15 In a universe that is not ordered by human values but in which human beings must live, it seems clear that people must align themselves, as best they can, with the given order, i.e., that of the universe, if they would thrive. And in order to align themselves with this order, people must decipher it to the best of their ability. The human dilemma as defined by Sullivan is that “Man begins with a natural chaos. He discovers an infinite world and must make his way in it with a finite mind.” Thus, our fundamental challenge is epistemological; how can we best learn what we need to know for human happiness? Especially since, as Sullivan emphasizes and reemphasizes, our individual tools for the purpose of learning are inadequate for the job at hand. Because of human limitations in time, in space, in perceptive capacity, in intelligence, “[w]e don’t, we cannot, exceed our limits.”16 Does this mean that human beings are doomed to live and die in abject ignorance, cursed with a desire to know, but never able to satisfy that desire? Not entirely. On the one hand, it is true that “[b]y the limitation of selfhood,

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each of us is committed to miss most of the faces of reality, as we see only three sides of the cube.” On the other hand, the very metaphor suggests the answer: though I may not be able to see the sides of the cube that face away from me, someone else can—and I can see the sides that are hidden from his or her sight. As Sullivan puts it, “We see with our own eyes, but we see better with the sight of others to aid us.” As Sullivan sees it (we now know incorrectly) “[i]n the animal world man’s knowledge is unique in that it is collective, transcending the false barriers of race and nation, pride and ego, heritage and dogma.” The acquisition of knowledge and wisdom can only be a social endeavor. Through this shared effort “[t]he individual expands, losing something of his limitations.”17 Even so, though we may understand more of our world by working together than by striving alone, as a species we face limitations: “Man looks at the world through a tiny telescope, and always sees only a small part of reality, his view inevitably limited.”18 Access to “[f]inal, complete truth” is denied us. Having gotten hold of our scrap of reality, “We arrange it in words that tend to order it. Then we hold in our hands and call it the pattern of life. We live by it, and it helps us to go on in purpose and balance. The finite mind settles with infinity.”19

Human Limitations and the Pragmatic Response So absolute truth exists, but human access to it is limited. Nonetheless, limited though we may be, we need truth (or as much of it as we can get) for “while the universe itself is not ordered by human values, we can and must assume values in our lives to attain vital order and purpose.”20 In fact, it turns out that the meaning of life is quite close to the Enlightenment project of discovering natural laws so as to operate in harmony with them: “God being a ‘cosmic process of progressive integration,’ our ‘purpose’ is to get in harmony with that process.”21 Under those circumstances “[o]ur spiritual goal . . . becomes earthly and immediate—: to establish a right relationship with the universe in which we smile at difference because ‘we are rooted in the one.’”22 Under those circumstances, “[t]he criterion of good and evil becomes consequence, that is whether it is in harmony with the cosmic process,”23 and the measure of a belief’s truth is the extent to which it is “in harmony with this process.”24 However, correct cosmic alignment is not the sole measure of values. Sullivan is also an inheritor of the pragmatic tradition, asserting that “value is . . . related to the needs of diverse individuals and societies.”25 In one article he launches into an extended discussion of two polar stances vis-à-vis reality, absolutism and relativism. He begins with a description and critique of absolutism. Absolutism, he writes, holds a dualistic view of the universe dividing it into the “gross and ephemeral” material realm and the “ideal and constant” spiritual realm. This means that if we take a social value like goodness, the adherent of absolute views holds this value

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to have its own existence, unrelated to and independent of human experience or the varying circumstances of human life. Sullivan is critical of this attitude inasmuch as it (1) does not serve human needs (demanding rather that people adjust themselves to the ideal) and (2) is “the demonstrable basis of the tyranny of the medieval church, western monarchy, and in our times the dogmatic systems of Hegel and Marx,”26 with “heresypunishing” elites using their claims to the possession of absolute truth as a basis for the control of others. The counterweight and corrective to this “despotism” is relativism, a system of thought that “holds value to be brain-created, spatial and temporal, existing only in mental projection.”27 To the adherents of this view, a value such as goodness “like all values, is a product of an individual mind, a ‘judgment,’ ‘universal’ only as it is shared by other minds.”28 In fact, Sullivan wonders, “How objective, how relevant is any truth except as it moves through individuals, applied in specific, sensate instances of life?”29 Since values do not have their own existence as such, then what are they? Here Sullivan squarely puts himself in the pragmatic tradition: values are functional in nature, created for and acting for the benefit of both the individual and the group. For the individual, as Sullivan puts it, “I suspect that while the universe itself is not ordered by human values, we can and must assume values in our lives to attain vital order and purpose.”30 He asks, “Don’t we all agree that though we cannot ‘prove’ a value, it is nonetheless useful for us to assume it?”31 However, these values are not existential givens, but rather “codes of behavior that clearly arise out of the needs of a given community.”32 Values, then, are not fixed but are in “perpetual flux,” shifting with and “variously related to the needs of diverse individuals and societies.” Therefore, he suggests (using polygamy as an example), what is good in one place may be evil elsewhere, and the values we assume are “related to our specific needs and conditions rather than universally binding.” The key point of judgment from the pragmatic standpoint is the benefit resulting from an action, and this is where, in Sullivan’s view, relativism shows its clear superiority to absolutism. The core benefit is “promoting social harmonies.” Relativism accomplishes this by freeing people from the tyranny of fixed ideas, a tyranny that freezes human society and its ability to adjust to changing circumstances and needs by freezing human minds. Since meaning “is not discovered but hypothesized,” it need not be fixed. Individuals and societies can creatively “relate order to their needs.” Granted, we lose a degree of mental comfort, for now we must all be engaged in the ongoing search for appropriate values for our place and time, whatever those may be. However, that means that we “are rescued at last from what Bacon called the web-spinning verbalism of philosophers and theologians and invited to the observation and improvement of immediate existence.” In this we find greater maturity, greater dignity, greater scope for human beings: “Our ideals no longer reside in the stars,

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beyond our reach, among gods degraded by human attributes.” Instead, “we accept our position in nature, recognizing our values as projects of our experience, but no less useful than imagined absolutes in the realization of our ends.”33 So, we seem to have two separate and, indeed, contradictory versions of the source of value: on the one hand, it derives from the absolute, which in this case is that which is given, whether it be called reality or God. From that point of view value derives from human beings getting “in harmony” or establishing a “right relationship” with a universe that “is not ordered by human values.” From that point of view, absolutism, which, according to Sullivan, “holds value to be real, unrelated, unconditioned, [and] thus independent of human perception,” seems to be vindicated. On the other hand, we have relativism—which Sullivan heartily espouses and which “holds value to be brain-created, spatial and temporal, existing only in mental projection.”34 Is this merely intellectual inconsistency? The key to understanding Sullivan’s point of view is the realization that he has a holistic understanding of well-being. For human beings to be happy, both their bodies and their minds must be satisfied. Because of the limitations of human knowledge—a theme that he emphasizes and reemphasizes—and because of the limitations of the human body, including a physically as well as psychologically limited point of view and limited longevity, humans cannot encompass the entirety of what exists—God in Sullivan’s terms—though to put meaning into a person’s life, the task of attaining omniscience must be undertaken. As Sullivan points out, though, “[t]he important fact is that this ‘meaning’ is not discovered but hypothesized.”35 Because of our limitations, “the whole story” is not and most likely will never be accessible to us. Relativism and pragmatism come into play at this point, inasmuch as the amount of that “whole story” to which we gain access is what we then give the name of “truth.” However, lacking the whole story, truth “resists a single formula,” “is always open to change,”36 and “remains open.”37 We “get as close to truth as we can,”38 but lacking complete truth, the human status is that of the perpetual seeker, making religion “a searching, not an arriving.”39 Our knowledge and, therefore, our understanding, then, individually and collectively, is and always will be limited. This means that we must maintain an open attitude, that the “vanity of certainty” must give way to “the humility of supposition and learning.” A closed attitude, the belief that the truth we already possess is complete, will cut off further discovery.40 In fact, our primary assets in arriving at truth are (1) an open attitude, (2) our individual powers of reason, and (3) our sharing, testing, and developing of our individual understandings in open discussions with others. It is in this context—the fact that such knowledge as we have is a social product plus the necessity, given the lack of complete human knowledge,

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for open communication—that Sullivan articulates his social vision. Social interaction is both a vehicle for discovering truth and the forum of applying it. In his piece “We Need Each Other,” he asks his readers, “what is the purpose of an interchange of ideas?” He fears that generally speaking people approach discussions as “a mutual extermination contest,” with the attitude that “only one of several ideas advanced around a table can be correct.” Given this belief in a limited and exclusive truth, the interaction becomes one of competition, an effort to establish a winner and a loser. In the process, alternative points of view are closed off and lost. The possibilities of truth become narrower, and everyone loses thereby. There are negative social consequences as well since “[t]he net result of our disputes is to weaken the persuasion of our own ideas, and to freeze existing tensions between us, perhaps alienating each other still further.”41 The antidote is a conscious reorienting of attitudes and intentions. It entails “a decision to go into a discussion with the intention of finding as many areas of agreement as we can, and carefully weighing each other’s beliefs, striving for synthesis wherever possible.” Rather than victory being an individual achievement, gained through the rhetorical annihilation of one’s opponent, victory is redefined as the finding of connections and is shared. It is the group achievement of knowledge, which represents a victory over ignorance, not over each other. Approaching this as a group endeavor is logical given that “if we are all seeking answers to essentially the same questions, we have perhaps a good deal to learn from one another.” What is being proposed here, then, is actually a model of good relationship as a friendly competition between individuals, not in the interest of either dominance or exploitation, but rather in the interest of the common good.42 Lacking complete knowledge, lacking even the possibility of ever arriving at complete knowledge, what then can possibly be the measure of truth? It is here that Sullivan plops himself firmly in the pragmatic camp, affirming that “[t]he criterion of good and evil . . . [is] consequence, that is whether it is in harmony with the cosmic process.”43 The implication of this phrase seems to be that though we cannot fully comprehend the “cosmic process,” we can know whether our actions are “in harmony” with it or not by their consequences. We might then inquire what consequences we might be looking for? This is where relativism comes into play: since the world is in a state of “perpetual flux,” value cannot be fixed; it must be “variously related to the needs of diverse individuals and societies” and their “specific needs and conditions.” Given that, what is sauce for the goose may not necessarily be sauce for the gander; “value ‘Good’ in one condition may be value ‘Evil’ in another (e.g., polygamy).” However, the criteria are to be found in human lives rather than divine revelation, and therefore “[i]t is merely asked that we do not claim a supernatural sanction for codes of behavior that clearly arise out of the needs of a given community.” Our own limitations as human beings, both individual

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and collective, mean that at best human values are “brain-created, spatial and temporal, existing only in mental projection,” the “product of an individual mind, ‘universal’ only as [they are] . . . shared by other minds.”44 Still, to judge consequences in relationship to the “needs of a given community,” we must have some basis of judgment; how can we know whether or not an action meets these needs? The answer seems to be based on its “effectiveness in promoting social harmonies.” Sullivan never articulates in much detail what he means by this. He does express a desire for a “decent society” and makes a passing approving reference to “the inseparable relation of Christianity with economic justice.”45 We can tell something of what he would wish to see in the world in his condemnation of “our capitalistic economy, filled as it is with selfishness among both management and labor,” our “greedy exploitation of our natural resources,” our shortsightedness in our “dangerous failure to plan ahead [to] avoid cyclical crises.”46 However, Sullivan’s social vision emerges most clearly in two separate discussions of actual compelling social experiences he had: (1) the college experience generally and (2) his experience attending the Conference on Religion in College Life (CORICL). Sullivan views the university as a model society. In an open letter to the incoming class of 1958, he tells the freshman class what he thinks “college is about.” First, he writes, “college is liberation.” From what? From the “long night of prejudice.” He goes on to a brief discussion of how the college student is likely to find him-/herself associating with a more diverse group of people than they had been used to. Out of these associations, out of shared simple but concrete experiences—whether watching the same movies as others or waiting in the same lines to purchase books—will come a sense of commonalty as the student sheds the “old ‘barriers,’ imposed upon us from childhood,” and comes to realize that “whatever one’s bank balance, or how long ago once people came to America, we really are all breathing the same air and walking on the same ground.” Next, he writes, college is “balance.” Here he introduces his favorite themes of rationality and empirical investigation over dogma along with tolerance of differing points of view; after all, “[t]here are always many answers, of which one, on the basis of experience, evidence and preference seems most correct to you.” Also, college is “structure.” That is, the learning process is not random, not a matter of learning “isolated facts without meaning,” but rather is a process through which the patterns of history and of life may be discovered. The student is the recipient of his/her intellectual inheritance, so to speak, i.e., the knowledge and understanding of the past transmitted to the present generation. With the discovery of the relationships of things to each other, a meaningful vision of the world may emerge and “knowledge of ‘what’ is crowned by knowledge of ‘why.’” And finally, “college is society.” This is a restatement of the discovery of commonalties expressed in the “college as liberation” theme, but it

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is placed in a broader context: “You become aware that the world does not begin and end with you, that whether big fish or small fish, we’re all swimming in the same current.” Moreover, “[y]our life is important, but only as it contributes to a larger human experience.”47 The other social experience that stands out in Sullivan’s writings is the Conference on Religion in College Life that he attended on April 24–25 in 1954. Though “wary” of both conferences and religion, Sullivan was delighted to find a “skillfully planned and excellently attended conference of intelligent people discussing ultimate issues with insight, courtesy, and startling honesty.” He found an atmosphere of complete intellectual freedom with no “forbidden areas” of discussion; however, the overwhelming tone of the event was one of “mutual respect” in which “no one sought to impose his terms” upon others. Rather, people holding “clearly opposite views” were able to exchange opinions with “mature friendliness,” allowing the participants to discover that often the “alleged barriers” dividing them were “purely verbal.” In the process, Sullivan found, many were able to “come closer to one another.”48 The critical factor in allowing this to occur was that participants shared one essential prerequisite: they were all open-minded—everything else flowed from this fact. In Sullivan’s description of these two social phenomena we can find a model of relationship and society as conceived by the liberal. First of all, all those coming are there for a common purpose, i.e., to discover truth. There is an underlying assumption that the discovery of truth will be of benefit to all the participants. This is the main point of union among the participants. Moreover, such truth as they find is not an individual possession inasmuch as “no one person, nor in one group, possesses it alone, unchanging and unchallengeable.” Indeed, our common need for meaning is as much a source of social cohesion as our physical need for each other inasmuch as “we get closer to truth as we get closer to each other, and are willing to learn from other approaches to the same reality.”49 And since humans are “nothing except as they live and move within a collective social structure, powerless without the instruments of the species,” our happiness cannot be a selfish happiness inasmuch as we are all linked together. The model for relationship among individual human beings, then, is one of interdependence. This endeavor is social, not solitary; however, it is vital that each of the participants be an individual, with their own thoughts, perceptions, and insights. If they were all identical in their thinking, then none would have anything to offer the others. So, disagreement and disputation are good things as long as their purpose is prosocial, i.e., to further the common good. And this is perhaps the outstanding feature of the liberal worldview—the seemingly opposed beliefs in individualism and the common good. To the extent that we may be able to possess truth, it must be a joint endeavor. And because we are not self-contained and are not our own creations but rather the creations of society and reality, in some sense we cannot claim a separate existence

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from each other and cannot find separate happiness from each other. If conducted in this spirit, with generosity, good will, and open-mindedness, then disputation becomes a process of testing, a process through which the participants can try out their ideas and discover what seems to hold in them and what must be discarded; those involved in such an endeavor may also benefit from each other’s ideas and insights. The entire process becomes one of both giving and taking. As human beings, the participants have a tool for the discovery of truth—reason. Given that all the participants in these phenomena as conceived by Sullivan recognize the worthiness of the search for meaning and truth, all appreciate one another not merely for what “I can get out of you” as in a cost/benefit analysis, but as being intrinsically worthy and valuable. The structural logic of this becomes clearer if one considers the nature of relationship: if things are the same, then there can be no relationship between them because to the extent that they are the same, they are identical, and identity is not a relationship. To the extent that things are different there can also be no relationship because in difference there is no point of contact. Therefore, the notion of relationship depends on a balance of sameness and difference, both of which must be maintained. The main point is that in this worldview, society is a success only insofar as all the members of society enjoy physical and psychological well-being; individuals are formed by other individuals and the social institutions they have developed; and individuals find the meaning of their lives and the deepest satisfactions of their lives in relationship to others; therefore, in contradistinction to the model of atomistic individualism, neither individuals nor the group can prosper in a context of atomistic individualism. As Sullivan puts it, “Your life is important, but only as it contributes to a larger human experience.”50 To be of value to each other, people must be able to bring their own ideas, understanding, and insights to the common table. In fact, Sullivan conceives this as the purpose of his own work, writing, “the object of this column is to serve, wherever possible, as the ground on which men can meet, to the end of that intellectual advance that is the product of man’s sharing of insights.” He insists on diversity of thought and opinion, telling his readers that “I shall expect you to stand up for my ideas if you agree with me, and to fight my ideas if you disagree. In this way my essays may serve as a point of departure in that exchange of ideas essential to intellectual vitality.”51 It is for this reason that it is imperative that people be free, and, for Sullivan, freedom means most importantly intellectual freedom. And this, at its heart, means disagreement and debate in politics, religion, art, and science, for the freedom to disagree, he says, unconsciously echoing Rosa Luxemburg, is “the stuff of freedom.”52 Freedom is not anarchy and has its limitations; indeed “the essence of freedom is restraint,” for “you are free only because others are not free to restrict your actions unjustly.”53 Certainly, as the product of society “the individual has as great an

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obligation to society as society has to him,”54 and therefore “when their interests conflict, society must prevail.”55 Still, only the individual who is fundamentally free to follow the truth as he or she sees it can actually serve society because only that person will actually have a contribution to make; therefore, “society preserves itself as it preserves its heretics, for there are points in time when its welfare depends on a single voice saying with Luther, ‘Here I stand,’ or with Emerson: ‘I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.’”56 And so, Sullivan promises his readers that “whether I’m discussing religion, art or politics, I shall always write with complete honesty, holding nothing back.”57 So the integrity of the individual as an individual is key to that person’s ability to make a contribution to others. Therefore, one’s difference from others must be maintained as well as one’s connection; uncritical conformity—“those social pressures tending to produce the common level of judgment and action . . . in which the individual is judged ‘right’ to the extent that he pursues majority standards”58—represents first of all a form of personal death. In one article, before going on to sing the praises of Emersonian individualism, Sullivan paints this scenario: I believe that conformity is gaining. I hope it is not winning out. It is safer to be silent, to be “one of the gang,” to “go along.” You keep out of trouble that way. And when in a year or two, the company agent checks up on your record, he finds that you’re just the fellow he’s been looking for. You held the “right opinions,” said the “right things,” joined the “right societies.” You get the job. You get your suburban home, your Cadillac, and your lodge ring. But in the meantime you’ve lost yourself. You wake up at fifty, and suddenly your golf course becomes dull; your cocktail parties become a bore, attended by people who talk too much, too fast, and seem overpowered by the idea of spending a single moment by themselves. The utter vacuity of a life lived without thought, without art, without poetry, without love, and without principle comes crashing in and too late you find that security is not happiness, that your mind is unequipped to enjoy the leisure it has earned.59 However, conformity for conformity’s sake not only represents the death of individuality but is a social danger as well; it leads to the belief that “if enough people pursue a goal, it must be correct,” and since no one can break out of the resultant stultifying stagnation, human progress must come to an end. It is here that the twin dangers of communism and McCarthyism and the vital importance of academic freedom come into play. The liberal—the true individualist—must walk an ideological tightrope in a dangerous world. Sullivan makes the danger explicit in his open letter to the class of 1958. He writes:

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This semester begins at a critical juncture in the East-West tensions, when the conflict between democracy and dictatorship has been clarified as perhaps at no point in human history. Our lives as students are not, and cannot be, isolated from this conflict. At college our task is to improve the conditions of democracy even as we perfect its defenses. It is never enough merely to hate tyranny, but always necessary to work for freedom. Without fear or hysteria, we must learn how to fight a two-front war, against the tyranny of the right and the tyranny of the left: how to fight Communists without surrendering to reactionaries. We must learn not to confuse reform with revolution, or criticism with subversion.60 Here Sullivan has put in a nutshell the liberal dilemma; liberals are engaged in a “two-front war” against two forms of tyranny, communism at home and abroad on their left and McCarthyism on their right. Liberals themselves are trapped in the middle, a “disease somewhere between polygamy and treason” to the right-wingers and a “hopeless illusion borne by an elite corps of buffoons” who “mistake the right to make pretty speeches for freedom” to those on the far left.61 However, the positions of far right and far left are just concrete manifestations of negative patterns of mind that must be combated and overcome if human beings are to be truly free. In the course of his writing Sullivan points out six of these patterns: unthinking conformity, hypocrisy, self-satisfaction, simplistic thinking, a penchant for comforting fantasies over challenging facts, and closed-mindedness. We have already examined conformity and its threat to individualism and hence the individual’s capacity to contribute to others. Sullivan’s discussions of hypocrisy emerge mostly in discussions of Christianity; it is clear that he yearns for a Jeffersonian Christianity stripped of supernaturalism, a humanistic Christianity that would represent “a vital consciousness of our place in the universe,” a “practice of moral belief,” while he rejects the “dependence of Christ’s ethical system on Christ’s claimed deity.” In fact, he sees the faith-based elements of religion as being responsible for what he perceives to be the “decline of the Christian church,” arguing that it “is precisely because modern youth seeks a more consistent and rational religion that the churches are losing their appeal.”62 In place of an earnest truth-seeking, Sullivan finds that in “the profusion of churches we are pleased to call ‘Christian,’ Christ is most difficult to find,”63 while “[t]hose who claim to serve him most often seemed to serve him least.” He imagines well-fed, smug clergymen, who “sigh, over their roast pork, that the youth of these iniquitous times are ‘irreligious,’ ‘cynical,’ or ‘materialistic.’”64 Then he gets down to specifics: How disillusioning it was to many of us in the last war to see the German clergy bless Hitler’s army even as the US clergy blessed ours.

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Self-satisfaction, a smug attitude, goes along with hypocrisy as a convenient blinder for those who have renounced the ongoing search for truth in the interest of comfort. Christianity for these has become “a best garment to be worn in those delicious Sunday hours when we, the ‘better people,’ can sit in our usual pews with our usual smugness, to hear our usual clergyman sanctify our prejudices with the accommodating approval of the Holy Spirit.”66 As a result, “[o]ne solemn hour on Sunday morning, in which we are cordially assured that the universe was created especially for us, provides a kind of hypnotic pardon for a week of unmodified egoism.”67 In condemning what he sees to be a tendency toward retreat into fantasy, Sullivan points out what he sees to be the limitations of religious faith, which rests “largely on an equation of desire with fact,” but he also expands his thinking into the realm of the political. For example, he sums up what he sees as the absurdity of current US policy toward China (nonrecognition) as “We do not like your government. Therefore, it does not exist. The painful fact is, of course, that it does exist.” There are real and very harmful consequences for this ostrich approach to the world since “In terms of power and influence the Mao government holds the key to the Asian situation. And if we are to save democracy in the Far East, we had better come to terms with now, not out of kindness to tyrants, but out of a realistic concern for US interests in Asia.”68 Related to fantastic thinking is simplistic thinking, whether in the spiritual or secular realm: on the one hand, traditional Christianity poses a “black-and-white choice” of “complete rejection or compulsion;”69 on the other hand, “[w]e Americans . . . like to divide the world into sweeping categories of black and white.”70 In Sullivan’s mind, this tendency is connected to absolutism, which “accepts, or is allied with, dualism.”71 The black and white view of the world is not only erroneous, it is also the source of certain forms of human tyranny. If right is right and wrong is wrong and that is an end to it, then he who considers himself to be in the right may, with a clear conscience, go about the business of suppressing heresy, i.e., opposing points of view. This may operate on a domestic level (McCarthyism) or internationally, where Americans tend to believe “there are only two alternatives open to the world: Submission to the Soviet Union, or (2) Submission to the United States.”72 The practical results of

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this are unfortunate: because dualism is not a view that reflects the realities of life, it leads to mistaken actions with negative results, a culture of tyranny over opinion at home and the alienation of those foreign countries that wish to follow an independent path abroad. One of the most misleading dualistic traps into which Sullivan sees Americans falling is the communist/democracy dichotomy. It is not so much that these two ways of organizing human society are not incompatible; they are incompatible. However, our fixation on this abstract distinction leads us to miss what may really be going on, much to our own detriment. Simplistic dualism has blinded the US to realities and hence to correct actions. He quotes President Syngman Rhee of South Korea as observing that “we are all caught up in a gigantic global struggle between communism and democracy. Coexistence of these two ideologies is impossible. Either one or the other must go.” However, Sullivan ripostes, “President Rhee and those who share his opinion forget one great fact: Communism and democracy ARE coexisting.”73 They are coexisting, he goes on to say, because both sides are aware of and terrified of the possibility of nuclear war. Therefore, “the current debate over the ‘possibility’ of coexistence loses all reality in the fact of coexistence.” Given this reality, the question changes from whether to coexist to “what kind of coexistence: one in which democracy or communism triumphs?”74 Sullivan fears that the United States—smug and self-righteous, standing “only for instant massive retaliation” and “get tough” policies, tied to antidemocratic dictators Franco, Tito, Peron, and Chiang Kai-shek, and “terrorized” by Joe McCarthy into identifying “diplomacy with appeasement and compromise with surrender”—is losing the battle. In the peripheral struggles of the developing world, Sullivan suggests, Americans’ obsession with evil communism has blinded them to the fact that “Indochina is a focus of the great nationalist movement that is sweeping Asia” and that “these nationalist revolutions are just expression of people who desire bread in freedom.” He approvingly quotes Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s statement “The revolutions which are brewing are not, however, Communist in origin, nor will they end even if Soviet Russia is crushed through war. The revolutionaries are hungry men who have been exploited time out of mind. This is the century of their awakening and mobilization, even as the 18th century was ours.”75 However, the dualistic view of the world based on absolute values has led the United States to believe that those who call themselves “communist” must be met with an uncompromising attitude and absolutism causes us to seek “to impose our terms upon others as impassioned crusaders”; therefore, “[i]n our almost exclusive reliance on military strength, we appear before smaller nations as a self-centered Colossus, subordinating all else to our own survival, callous to the fears of those who wonder whether our efforts are really limited to defense.” In the process, we ignore “the realities of world politics” and sacrifice the opportunity to “exploit them

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coolly in the interest of liberty.”76 On the other hand, the dualistic, black and white thinking of those who eschew rationality is likely to lead to black and white results, especially in an age in which thermonuclear war would “destroy everything we love as well as everything we hate.”77 Those who, like Senator William F. Knowland of California or President Syngman Rhee of South Korea, believe that the coexistence of democracy and communism is impossible first of all ignore the fact that such coexistence is already taking place. Again, dualistic thinking depends on allegiance to an illusory version of reality, and the concrete result is that “the current debate over the ‘possibility’ of coexistence loses all reality in the fact of coexistence.”78 Meanwhile, the real question, “what kind of coexistence: one in which democracy or communism triumphs?”79 is lost, and the fixation on the annihilation of the ideological opponent, the belief that “either one or the other must go,”80 leads proponents of democracy to pass up the many smaller and limited but real and cumulatively extremely powerful opportunities to use American strengths and exploit Soviet weaknesses as they present themselves. The result of such a loss of contact with reality, Sullivan tells his readers, is that “as I write, we are losing the battle with communism.”81 And the results could be more drastic yet, for those who ascribe to dualism in the form of an “all-or-nothing policy” must be “ready to accept nothing.” Therefore, far from blindly striking out at every national movement that calls itself “communist” or “socialist,” American foreign policy should reflect the understanding that the world’s developing countries are vulnerable to communist appeals for the same reasons that postwar Europe was; conditions of “poverty, hunger, disease and oppression”82 send their victims looking for answers. The nation that credibly offers relief from this suffering will gain friendship without resort to war. The best way to fight communism abroad then is to “wage war on human misery, moving boldly to correct the economic and political injustices on which communism thrives, and thus recapture the initiative for democracy.”83 America must lend material assistance to “oppressed people . . . not merely out of generosity but in realistic terms of American security and keeping as much of Asia as possible out of the Communist empire.”84 It is the flexibility of the relative view that will allow Americans, first of all, to realize that “the world is not made in our image” and that “to gain advantage we must give advantage . . . we cannot change facts by denunciation or ostrich retreat, as, for example, we have sought to do in denying Mao’s obvious control of China, instead of shrewdly seeking to split the forced alliance of Moscow and Peiping.”85 A realistic American policy, not held hostage to the absolutist view with its dualistic assumptions, will treat its allies as equals who are not always bound to agree with American views. Such a policy will be understanding of the special pressures, historical and present, that countries such as France and India face, the first—in the wake of three invasions in 70 years—wary of a re-armed Germany,

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and the second—with the Soviet Union and China abutting her northern borders—cautious in choosing sides in the great world conflict. However, if the US fails to act constructively, if it “resist[s] this tide” of nationalistic aspirations, it “must be prepared to lose large, uncommitted areas to the Russian Empire.”86 And if America does not act to aid the developing world, the USSR will, “if only to extend their own kingdom.”87 Sullivan, like most university liberals, is a firm anticommunist and believes that the “cynical immorality of the Communists” is “proven by their record.” He acknowledges that the communist bloc will seek to use coexistence as a “device to lull us to sleep while communism ‘nibbles’ away at the world.”88 But these objections miss the point: coexistence is not surrender; it is competition. The existence of nuclear weapons has changed the entire calculus of international affairs, compelling Cold War opponents to realize “that H-bomb war is suicidal”; in lieu of warfare, “they will accept economic rivalry in which each side will seek to prove the superiority of its system over the others,” and in that rivalry, “[w]hatever system proves more viable, better able to serve the needs of its people, utilize its resources and ride the waves of international trade and finance, will win.”89 However, the rivalry is not only one of “dollars and rubles”; it is also ideological—a struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the world, to use a more modern phrase. Here Sullivan sees present advantage going to the communists, and he finds irony in the fact that “the reactionary dictators of the Kremlin should be succeeding in posing as revolutionary democrats and saviors of the oppressed and hungry, as they are posing especially in Russia and Asia.”90 So, through sheer ineptitude the United States has “lost the ideological initiative to the Soviet Union, which contrives the illusion that it is a Savior of the oppressed and the bearer of progress while we defend a despotic past”;91 in losing the propaganda initiative, the United States has “given Moscow a monopoly on the word ‘peace.’” Moreover, “our acts as a great power do not convince millions of people of our just intentions.” Asia, Sullivan writes, fears that the US intends a “new imperialism”92 and, by allying with dictators abroad, the US has compounded the irony: We are true revolutionaries, and instead of being on the defensive, as we too often are, we should be championing national independence and awakening. We should recapture for democracy the symbols of bread, land and peace which our negative policies have surrendered to dictators.93 The way to proceed, then, is consistent with the core liberal view; while “in summary, we must not confuse coexistence with the gradual surrender to the communist empire,”94 US policy should follow the via media, containing that empire with a “strong and mobile military alliance,” while

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remaining simultaneously vigilant and steady “to repulse new communist aggressions,” “tirelessly seek[ing] to create conditions in which we achieve our ends and discourage those of the communists through positive diplomacy,” and ultimately defeating communism by removing the “conditions in which it thrives,”95 i.e., “the poverty, hunger, disease and oppression on which Moscow bases its appeal.”96 This brings Sullivan to a selective depiction of our national history, for Americans must remember: Under our founders we fought for national independence and civil liberties. Under Jackson we made war on excessive wealth in a few hands. Under Lincoln we fought slavery and racial oppression. Under Wilson we fought for national self-determination, opposing big powers secret diplomacy. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt we struck a lethal blow at domestic communism by relieving the conditions that encouraged it.97

McCarthyism Victory abroad, however, depends also on conditions at home, or, as Sullivan puts it, “Division at home is defeat abroad.”98 And here Sullivan finds multiple problems, not the least of which is that “We are terrorized by one power-mad Senator who mocks our President, condemn our closest ally, and whips our fears into an age of silence and suspicion.”99 Like other mainstream college liberals, Sullivan is no fellow traveler and accepts the reality of communism as a threat to the United States. He analyzes the threat of communism as threefold: (1) an “external, military challenge (treated above)”; (2) an “internal challenge of espionage and subversion”; and (3) an “ideological challenge.” And he proposes solutions to each of these: to the first, “Democratic victory depends simply on meeting physical force with superior physical force”; with regard to the second aspect, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and an “alert citizenry” must cooperate to expose espionage. However, it is aspect number three, the ideological challenge, that really captures Sullivan’s attention; his solution is simply put—“Democratic victory depends on a better idea”—but overall in his writing there is some complexity in his understanding of the factors involved. First of all, the “better idea” approach is propounded as the fundamental solution, not only to the domestic communist challenge, but also to the global challenge. In a free society the concepts that are comprised by communism should have an open hearing; then “like all theories, it . . . stands or falls in the light of public discussion and experience.”100 In fact, the ideas underlying communism render it vulnerable; as Sullivan sees it, it is unfree inasmuch as it requires an “enforced community” and “minimizes the necessity for differentiation,” and is unrealistic in that it overestimates the “human capacity for harmony.”101

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However, there is a genuine communist threat, and that is communism as an “underground secret conspiracy,” unwilling to “play by the rules of the game.”102 Every constitutional government has an “inherent right” to preserve itself, and it is “natural and right” that such a government should take steps against subversive elements. In a further concession, Sullivan grants that it also is not surprising that colleges and universities should be foci of suspicion since “it is in the University that no ban exists as to what may be read or discussed, from the most radical ideas to the most conservative.”103 And Sullivan takes yet a step closer to those he opposed by acknowledging that these suspicions are “partly justified” inasmuch as there are indeed communists who “have used academic freedom as a means of indoctrination.”104 It is perhaps just here that Sullivan illustrates in his own argumentation the core of the liberal approach to disputation: he seeks to persuade, not to destroy. He is not seeking to annihilate his ideological opponents but rather is seeking a truth that, if properly understood, all will willingly assent to. He takes pains to concede as much as seems possible and reasonable to those whom he hopes to persuade so that when the distinction that is coming is made, it will be as minor, as painless, as possible to those whom he hopes to persuade. And that distinction is that those who attack institutions of higher learning as bastions of subversion are exercising “imperfect reasoning” in that they have failed to “distinguish between discussing an idea and advocating it, between teaching and preaching.” Note again Sullivan’s desire to maintain harmony; those with whom he disagrees are not guilty of evil intentions but merely of “imperfect reasoning,” and, no doubt, if they reasoned more logically, they would understand their error and change their position. However, Sullivan realizes that there is something going on in America that is not reasonable and that does not seem to be susceptible to reason: that is McCarthyism. “The issue,” he writes, “has never been one man from Wisconsin. The issue has always been McCarthyism, which may be defined as the voice and the exploitation of our weaknesses and fears in a time of peril.”105 And although by December 1954 the Senate may have made a start toward sanity by censuring McCarthy himself, the greater challenge lies ahead inasmuch as “[w]e still have to triumph over ourselves.” Looking for the roots of McCarthyism, Sullivan finds them in an assortment of places—the “sensationalism” of the US press, the politicians who either abetted him or, fearing him, remained silent, the failure of an “ineffective opposition” to offer a “sane alternative,” the silence of people “in high places” (presumably Eisenhower, whom Sullivan censures elsewhere for failing to oppose McCarthy)—but above all, Sullivan believes that Americans need to look at themselves. He suggests that America’s long history of relative global isolation ill-prepared her citizens for the Cold War and the psychological tensions of a “constant state of siege” and ongoing confrontation by an enemy motivated by a “messianic ideology”

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that “struck at the very foundations of our society.” The addition to that of the Hiss case and the “possibility of an internal communist conspiracy,” the Soviet Union’s announcement of its possession of atomic weapons, and a war in Korea gave rise to a situation that was ripe for a demagogue to exploit. McCarthy offered “quick solutions and easy answers to the most complex issues.” Meanwhile Americans became “more aware of our earlier naïveté” and more conscious of “the inadequacy of our economic and military defenses against the skillful organization of Moscow,”106 and as the country became conscious that it faced a threat for which it was not prepared, “public confidence in the existing government collapsed and suspicion gripped the nation.”107 With the end of 20 years of Democratic possession of the White House, there were those who hoped that Eisenhower, symbolizing “responsible conservatism,” could calm the destructive tendencies of McCarthyism; instead the turmoil reached the inner levels of national government, with an Attorney General who charged Truman with treason, a State Department whose morale and efficiency were buffeted by “waves of suspicion,” a nominee for Ambassador to the Soviet Union whose loyalty was questioned, an intelligence chief who was publicly attacked, a Secretary of State who was openly defied, and a president whose ability to conduct foreign relations was threatened by proposals for a “crippling” constitutional amendment (the Bricker Amendment). As the political disease spread over the country, “textbooks [were] be purged, criticism was labeled subversion, and devotion to Senator McCarthy became the test of loyalty.” In the end it was only as the administration came to see that McCarthy threatened “not only communists but powerful Republicans as well” that it intervened, first weakening McCarthy through the Army hearings and then supporting a censure movement that succeeded though “not supported by half of the President’s party.”108 This was the history of McCarthyism. The technique and success of McCarthyism relied on one primary type of distortion of truth that we have already considered in a more general context, that is, simplistic thinking, in this case in the form of dualistic thinking. As Sullivan sees it, “[a]ll those who are not pro-McCarthy are promptly condemned as pro-Communist.”109 It is only freedom from the black and white mentality that will allow Americans to “learn to distinguish real anti-communists from demagogues.”110 Time and again, as do other college liberals, Sullivan returns to variations of this theme in his writing. He worries that “[u]nquestionably much that is genuinely progressive has been seriously hurt by its identification by less balanced people with the Communist movement.”111 More specifically, there is a tendency to identify all critical thought as subversive, and to classify liberals, socialists and communists indiscriminately in one group. In addition to profound differences in the ideals and methods of these

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groups, the primary distinction is that liberals and Democratic Socialists remain loyal to our constitutional form of government, whereas communists violently opposed it. Keeping these distinctions intact—refraining from a dualistic approach that only recognizes “either/or”—is essential to the “liberty of loyal citizens,” but, even more, “to all social progress,” for progress means change—change for the better—and the ability to engage in critical thought and speech is the necessary precondition for such change. What Sullivan never grasps is that this postulation that to him seems so self-evident—that America is not perfect and that it could be changed for the better—is precisely the point at issue between American conservatives and liberals. Conservatism and liberalism represent two irreconcilable visions of America. The adherents of both these visions share a common vocabulary of values; they exalt democracy, freedom, individualism, peacefulness, and honesty and identify these as specifically “American values.” However, where they diverge is that to the conservative America is regarded as an already realized ideal, needing only to be preserved and protected. The followers of this vision of America are intolerant of voices of dissent because dissent brings the perfection and fulfilled quality of this vision into question. Thus, it is a primarily defensive vision, which privileges qualities of sameness among Americans, builds upon this sameness as its foundation, and is therefore suspicious of differences. The other America—Sullivan’s America—is a vision that has yet to be realized; it lies in the future. Here diversity and dissent are embraced as the engines by which America is to evolve toward its promised perfection. From this point of view, the realization of democracy and freedom is an ongoing project. The voices of workers, leftists, African Americans, ecologists, feminists, and promoters of peace are required as the impetuses that will propel this project toward its ultimate realization. The delineation of communism is simple for the first America; it is quite simply the opposite of everything America is. Communists are unscrupulous, Americans are scrupulous; communists are aggressive, Americans are peaceful; communists are deceptive, Americans are honest. Communism plays a critical role for this America of the negative reference that helps America define its psychic boundaries, find and identify its foundations of shared qualities, and further marshal its energies. For the second America, communism, for several reasons, represents a more complex phenomenon. First, the worldview associated with “America to be realized” is more complex since it rests on diversity. Second, as already noted, this view shares certain assumptions with communists that, since communists are opposed to the American political system and therefore are more or less inevitably defined as enemies of the state, offer a terrible complication to liberals and leave the critical opening to throwing doubt on their loyalty.

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It seems worthy of note that—in marked contrast to those who are vulnerable to communist ideology because of “poverty, hunger, disease and oppression”112—Sullivan’s attitude toward those fellow Americans who fall in with the McCarthyist fear-mongering is markedly unsympathetic. As mentioned earlier, he acknowledges their fearfulness, but the overall tone of his writing depicts people who are smug, hypocritical, and closeminded because it is comfortable and easy to be that way. Of course, he had had closer and more personal contact with American society than, say, Eastern European or Southeast Asian society, and perhaps closer personal acquaintance with the denizens of those areas would have made him harsher toward those who were susceptible to communist propaganda. In any case, it seems possible that it is here, in the unwillingness to develop a sympathetic understanding of the causes of American receptivity to McCarthyism and a sympathetic understanding of the people who were receptive to McCarthyist fear-mongering, that liberals lost their political footing. Liberals had a positive program—New/Fair Deal liberalism—but, as will be argued in greater detail in the next chapter, because of their adherence to relativism and pragmatism with the accompanying aversion to metaphysical underpinnings, they had no foundation for a strong positive appeal to the voters. Hence, they fell, despite themselves, into the terms of discourse laid out by their opponents, and liberals could not win on those terms; they could only win if they set out and controlled new terms of discourse, and this they failed to do. Therefore, since they were essentially playing the McCarthyite game, they found themselves eternally on the defensive. The fundamental concern, then, not only for Sullivan but also for other liberal writers of the period, is the repressive effect of the ongoing fear: “[t]here is unmistakably abroad in the land, a tendency to regard even the mildest criticism with a worried suspicion,”113 and even more that Americans have lost sight of the fact that “criticism is not Communism and that freedom is not the right way to destroy freedom.” This does not merely reflect a personal concern about one’s ability to speak freely, important though that may be; the greater issue, as we have seen already, is that the liberal point of view involves certain postulates, i.e., (1) that American society, though worthy and valuable, is not perfect, that it has problems that require addressing, (2) that the most valuable tool human beings have for addressing social problems is their ability to reason so that (a) the problem may be perceived and understood correctly and (b) the most efficacious remedy may be found, (3) that the ability to address social problems, then, rests on the ability to use reason freely and without fear of repercussion for mistaken or unpopular opinions, and (4) that McCarthyism and other intellectually repressive movements (such as communism), then, pose a danger not only to the ability of individuals to be free but also to people’s collective ability to identify social problems and remedies. Hence, it is first of all vital that “[w]e . . . make it clear that a legitimate concern with the improvement of society has little to do with the plot to overthrow it,”114 and then that in the interest of the critical

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tool of reason, it be widely understood that “[p]rejudice is not proof and concessions to popular emotion may very often involve the surrender of personal integrity and the compromise of ideals that should hold fast.”115 Concretely these problems manifest as the silencing of the free-flowing dialogue so vital to a properly functioning society; there are the “silenced politicians, afraid to speak out against the McCarthy dictatorship for fear of losing votes,” and there are responsible groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, “whose sole aim is to preserve freedom of speech for all groups,” and the Americans for Democratic Action, which “are condemned as tools of the Kremlin” because they suggest that “American is still short of paradise” and because of their support of the protections embodied in the Bill of Rights.116 Closer to home, on the college campus, Sullivan finds “silent students who find the word ‘liberal’ too controversial and ‘leftist’ to apply it to themselves, to whom concern about poverty has become too ‘communistic’ to mention in cider-and doughnuts society.”117 And, he goes on: It can’t happen here? It’s happening, in Durham. Study Russian and you can count on a frightened curiosity or nervous joke from the 99 out of 100 who assume that your familiarity with the Russian verb “to walk” provides you with a direct line to Mrs. Malenkov’s bedroom. Suggest that this Norman Thomas fellow is really quite sensible, and count on a cretinous switch in the conversation to such burning 20th century issues as Christine, Pogo, or “Ricochet Romance.” Liberal Arts 1954: a bewildered blend of identity, banality, and withdrawal.118 The result is that crucial issues do not get discussed and therefore cannot be managed in a realistic and beneficial way as “in the past decade we have come to avoid controversial subjects as a lethal infection.” How often, for example, you hear the recognition of China freely debated, let alone advocated? How often do you hear straightforward criticism of our capitalistic economy, filled as it is with selfishness among both management and labor, a greedy exploitation of our natural resources, a dangerous failure to plan ahead [and] avoid cyclical crises? Where can you find published criticism of certain church bodies whose un-Christian and antidemocratic practices most of us privately reject?119

Academic Freedom It is for these reasons that the battle to maintain academic freedom emerges as central to the maintenance of a free society, for “it is in the academic community, if anywhere, critical inquiry and responsibility essential to free society must flourish.”120 In a piece published on December 3, 1953,

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entitled “Academic Freedom and Communism,” Sullivan surveyed some of the positions on the subject laid out by some prominent liberals of the day, Sidney Hook of New York University in his Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No! (New York, J. Day Co., 1953), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s response to Hook in The Saturday Review (June 13, 1953), and Alan Barth in The Loyalty of Free Men (New York, Viking Press, 1951). In this essay Sullivan shows an understanding of the positions of each of these men and the distinctions among them, but he makes no indication of a preference or position of his own. However, in the fall of 1954 Sullivan wrote at some length about the issue. The distinction between his style of argument and that of the McCarthyist right was never more in evidence than here. Sullivan’s desire is to persuade, which entails making as many connections as possible with those who oppose him. His underlying logic appears to be that if one concedes whatever seems reasonable to concede, that will lead opponents to believe that he is a reasonable fellow and worth listening to. Having made his concessions and having gained his opponents’ ears, he would then be able to marshal his arguments to demonstrate the truth of his position, arguments supported by a logic that reasonable people must accept. So, Sullivan sees that universities, as the preeminent loci where ideas are exchanged freely, where “no ban exists as to what may be read or discussed, from the most radical ideas to the most conservative,” are liable to be suspect as instruments of subversion. Further, Sullivan grants that this view is “partly justified,” though it is also “partly erroneous.” There are communists in the universities who have “used academic freedom as a means of indoctrination,” Sullivan writes, but then there are also the majority of teachers in the humanities who, where appropriate, teach students about controversial subjects such as Marxism but not to indoctrinate but to inform. However, “some government agencies” seem to reason thus: “In University ‘C.’ Marxism is being taught; therefore, Marxism is being advocated; therefore, the professor involved should be dismissed as subversive.” Thus, these authorities fail to “distinguish between discussing an idea and advocating it, between teaching and preaching.” The pressure and intimidation brought to bear by this line of thinking are deleterious inasmuch as they cripple colleges in their ability to fulfill one of their chief functions, that is, as “the first line of democracy’s defense.” The college plays this role because it ensures the existence of “free enterprise” ideas, relying on “open competition as the safeguard of truth, a competition in which it is never enough merely to hold opinions, but always necessary to show the factual basis on which opinions are based.” To interfere with academic freedom then is to “stifle all progress” because it is the freedom to challenge received ideas that creates change, and “only in change is there progress.” More specifically, in combating the ideological appeal of communism, liberal democracy can triumph, not by seeking to suppress ideas that cannot and will not be suppressed, but only by “offering a better idea.” This

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means that those who espouse communism must be free to hold to their beliefs and be safe in their employment, so long as they have not become mere propagandists and have not “exchanged free inquiry for servitude to dictatorship.” Indeed, given the necessity to defeat communist ideology, the freedom of academia should be enhanced; only then can those who reject communism meet and conquer its challenge in open debate, and, in doing so, “prove the superiority of democracy as an idea,” “expose the fallacies of communist thought,” and also “perfect our defenses against it.” Indeed, Sullivan asks, “What have we to fear from free discussion if we are convinced of the validity and endurance of our own system?” Only those who actively seek to destroy the system desired by the majority by violence, subversion, or indoctrination should be dismissed from their positions. Should it be determined that a teacher has degenerated into a propagandist, then “that professor cannot in conscience be retained.” However, to perform his social function as an effective critic, a teacher “must answer first to his own conscience, unintimidated by popular disapproval or political pressure.” In that role the teacher has limited freedom—indeed, “the essence of freedom is restraint”—for “it is never enough merely to hold opinions, but always necessary to show the factual basis on which opinions are based.” Specifically, the professor is restricted by “fact, ethics, the opinions of others, and national law.” He must abjure any temptation to indoctrinate his students and must be “neither an instrument of subversion against the state, nor an instrument of propaganda for the state.” On the other hand, if a communist can be expelled for merely being a communist, for holding unorthodox opinions without any evidence that they have abused their positions, the danger is grave to the entire democratic project. For then what is to protect the liberal Democrat or liberal Republican (there were some still in those days)? And Sullivan adduces some recent examples as warnings: the “fate of colleges in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Soviet Russia, where an erosion of academic freedom finally reduced education to a puppet of the state.” He finishes with a favorite quotation of liberals of the period, Jefferson’s comment that we “should not be afraid to tolerate error so long as reason is left free to combat it,” and adds the observation that since “truth invariably serves freedom,” it is “not . . . necessary to silence unsound ideas.”121

Liberalism In Sullivan’s thinking the modern liberal is the one who uniquely relies on an unbiased use of reason to improve human life by seeking to understand reality, using the resulting understanding, not for partial or prejudiced benefits, but for the benefit of all. It is the liberal who “[n]ow, as always . . . bears the burden of progress and the risks of change.”122 On February 3,

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1955, Sullivan wrote a piece entitled “The Liberal Function” in which he set out to trace the development of modern liberalism through the work of five men, John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Green and John Dewey. Though each of these figures found himself confronted by very different social and economic conditions, what Sullivan finds binding them all together is the quest for the “extension of freedom,” or, more specifically, a concern to free “one segment of society from the oppression of another.” Thus, Locke speaks for the 17th century British gentry and merchants against the aristocracy and the monarchy; Smith speaks for 18th century budding industrialists against the squirearchy, opposing “all but the minimal functions of the state”; Mill, “mentor of representative democracy,” starts to generalize the issue of freedom from oppression from specific socio-economic groups to a concern that everybody be free from the oppression of anybody, suggesting an active governmental role in the maintenance of such freedom; Green seeks to impose yet more structure on the “chaotic individualism” of the earlier liberals, explicitly favoring a strong government “whose object is to maintain conditions in which the majority and not just favored classes prosper” and insisting “that every personal right is balanced by a social duty”; finally Dewey completes the task of correcting the understanding of the relationship of the individual to society with a denial that people can know or do anything meaningful except in association; government’s role has now been expanded into the active and indispensable agent of an individual-creating society. Sullivan acknowledges that this is “a perilously simplified treatment of historic liberalism,” but points out that his purpose in this précis is to point out that through the process he describes (1) some class “is freed, or seeks freedom, from the domination of another,” and (2) that a gradual transition occurs through which “first the individual is believed to be free only apart from government—later only through government.” Finally, summing up contemporary liberalism, Sullivan writes that the modern liberal “functions broadly within the tradition of Green and Dewey,” accepting “the social nature of national wealth” and “the responsibility of the government to maximize conditions enhancing the health and welfare of its citizens.” It is the duty of the state to “moderate the extremes of wealth and poverty on which communism thrives” and also to plan to avoid the crises and sufferings brought on by depressions. On the other hand, 20th century developments, specifically the “recent experiments in collective economy and total government control” conducted by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, have alerted liberals to the repressive potentialities of state regulation. However, far from discrediting the modern liberal project, these developments have refined and clarified it; the “liberal function” is, in fact, to “effect an essential balance in our society,” to realize “that balance of freedom and control, rights and duties, which both individualists and collectivists often fail to grasp.”123 Furthermore, the liberal must “formulate [ideals] and extend them into

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the actual.”124 This point of view grows directly out of Sullivan’s core epistemological beliefs; he writes: I accept Dr. Dewey’s suggestion that the liberal function today is to preserve the best of the old in harmony with the needs of the new. It is to “mediate social transitions,” avoiding both the paralysis of reaction and the blindness of nihilism. It is to take a middle road, rejecting the tyranny of the left and the tyranny of the right. It is to escape the restrictions of a closed and inflexible dogmatism, denying that in any area of life it can be a single infallible set of answers, or situation that is entirely black and white. If time has taught us anything, it has shown that progress and stability occur only as we subject our institutions and beliefs to continuing process of criticism and adjustment in response to society’s needs and aspirations. This criticism and this adjustment are the heart of the liberal functions, now as before. Only in this balance of what we are and what we want to be can freedom be further extended into more lives.125 Once again we have the themes of the via media, the belief that lack of freedom dwells in the extremes and that the liberal, as the inhabitant of the middle, is the guardian of liberty through his or her rejection of the notions of final truths and dualistic thinking and consequent espousal of the perpetually open mind and ongoing intellectual exploration. Finally, in an essay dealing with Hocking’s The Lasting Elements of Individualism,126 Sullivan further refines his view of the individual and the state. The core insight that he derives from Hocking is that “in an interdependent world, isolation is impossible.” Society again must balance forces, creating liberty for creative purposes but restricting it where necessary for “economic justice.” The state, then, serves as an agent of the people to eliminate the chaos of atomistic individualism and to “eliminate the inner frictions that preclude unified activity.” Yet the fine ongoing tension between the individual and the group is kept alive inasmuch as “the individual conscience remains supreme, neither manipulated nor disregarded, standing in relation to a man as truth stands to the scientist—outside of him, and the very nature of things. To this conscience government must answer.”127

The Role of Prophets That role of conscience, in Sullivan’s thinking, is particularly fulfilled by those he terms society’s “prophets.” In this framework the prophet is not one with special divine inspiration but rather one who sees and understands the outermost boundaries of reason. It is only “if we respond to the finest in our tradition” that “we can build a very decent society,” and “the finest in our tradition is: ‘Trust

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yourself.’”128 It is in this context that Sullivan brings up an archetypal figure that appears often in his work, i.e., the prophet. The prophets are the ones who preeminently do not go along with the crowd but follow their own truth without regard to consequences. They are the people who “seem to live beyond the perimeter of reality, compelled by some tenuous and uncompleted dream,” who “see before we see, hear before we hear, and build castles while we lift ourselves from the mud.”129 They also seem to be advanced liberals with largely secular concerns, including Christ, the “wisdom of [whose] moral teaching, all reasonable people will agree, is not dependent on alleged miracles, but in its effectiveness in promoting social harmonies.”130 Christianity, in Sullivan’s thinking, becomes largely a matter of criticizing “first pew Christians” who preach charity but do not actually practice it, “the futile barrenness of ritual,” and “the blindness to one’s own faults that attends the judgment of others,” all the while urging “the inseparable relation of Christianity with economic justice.”131 Finally then, Christ “joins the other great moralists of the world in making a decent life the object of religion, in a creative contempt for all that is shallow, pompous and tyrannical.”132 Like Socrates or Jesus, their fates are often unkind, for “they go to their hemlock and their cross because we are not ready for them.”133 They are publicly mocked as “impractical idealists,” but such idealists, Sullivan argues, are in truth “the hardest of realists and the wisest of economists,”134 the “most realistic, most practical men among us.”135 In fact, those who portray themselves as hard-nosed realists, the “power realists” whose self-definition is accepted by press and public, those who insist on the short-sighted logic of “peace ‘through strength,’” despite “5000 years of historical proof to the contrary,” these are the irrational visionaries. Sullivan points out that “[t]he illusion of military security has been exploded incessantly throughout history no more clearly than in this present hour when with every new bomb and tank that emerges from the world’s war factories, human fears and insecurity grow.”136 Meanwhile, the clear-seeing prophets are condemned and punished in the modern world, not with hemlock or crucifixion, but with “contempt, an amused urbanity, or a bland dismissal: ‘Well, that’s all very nice, but this is a hard, cool world of atom bombs.’” It is the “hardened ‘realist’ who, after 5000 years of historical proof to the contrary, still insists he can have peace ‘through strength’” who is the “most visionary.”137 How can anyone look at history and not be filled with a sense of the barbaric futility of bloodshed and the proven inability of war to create enduring solutions of human problems? How does it escape our attention that after two cataclysmic world wars we have reestablished the very conditions that led to those wars? The “power realists” throughout the world insist that we can have “peace through strength.”

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It is true, I think, that we can use our strengths as a deterrent to war until the rational conditions of peace have been established. But I find it incredible that after 5000 years of human history to the contrary we should still place an almost exclusive reliance on armed might as the basis of “peace.” The illusion of military security has been exploded incessantly throughout history no more clearly than in this present hour when with every new bomb and tank that emerges from the world’s war factories, human fears and insecurity grow.138 But it is the prophets who “remind us that whatever is gained by violence can only be held by violence,”139 and that “somehow we must find some means of solving our problems that will not create greater problems for those who come after us.”140 Sullivan marks two groups as prime exemplars of this kind of constructive and advanced thinking: pacifists and world federalists. He admires these groups, first of all, because unlike the hypocritical “first pew” Christians who Sullivan excoriates more than once, pacifists and world federalists practice what they preach. The pacifist “takes Christ seriously,” remembering that Jesus “asked men to love one another, to do good to those that hate them.” They also take the Sixth Commandment—“Thou shalt not kill”—seriously. They make themselves outcasts by taking their beliefs “beyond the church doors,” and they demonstrate their courage by their willingness to “resist society when you think it’s wrong to go along with it, no matter what your own convictions may be.” And their values are values that Sullivan finds admirable, i.e., that fulfill the requirements of “decency” and common sense; for example, pacifists, “unlike Lenin,” see “a direct relationship between means and ends,” and understand that “[o]ne does not make the world safer for democracy by dropping an A-bomb.” They also see that though “[o]ne may temporarily subdue an opposing army with military might . . . he is left with the political and economic situation antithetical to the very peace and freedom he has been fighting for, having created enduring resentment and hatred among the conquered people.”141 Sullivan’s admiration for world federalism points out some of the significant political dangers for liberalism as the ideology of rationality. Given that national divisions and hatreds have been a root cause of many destructive wars, there is a strong common sense argument to be made for an authority that transcends national boundaries. Sullivan argues that “[w]e tolerate on an international level what is inconceivable on the town level: a virtual absence of binding law and order,” urging further that “we must govern international relations as we govern all others, by an authority recognized by all nations as supreme in international matters, as our states recognize Washington as supreme in national matters.” His arguments are all aimed at the rational, the common sense. National sovereignty? How can a nation be said to be truly sovereign “when its primary actions are determined not by its own wishes but by the aggressive

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designs of a hostile power”? And, in any case, “[s]cience has technically united the globe, reducing national boundaries to a fiction.” Certainly there are “great barriers” of economy, race, language, and religion, but “[r]ecognizing these obstacles does not require us to accept them as unchangeable, nor does the fact that we are not yet willing to practice the ideals of pacifism and world federalism detract from the logic of their argument.”142 The underlying problem here for liberals is the fact that they might even think such thoughts, i.e., that allegiance to country, flag, etc., is ultimately irrational and therefore is something that in the fullness of time should be abandoned, open them to the suspicion that their loyalty to country and flag is not dependable. Of course, the logic of the market is also not especially patriotic—businesspeople who export American jobs overseas for the sake of profits might have their loyalty questioned—but that was not the issue of the 1950s. Sullivan’s ideals are transnational: (1) his view of humanity embraces the transnationalism of the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims human rights, not American rights, the very point that a Burkean conservative would (and that Burke—in relation to France—did) dispute, and (2) his understanding of how humanity should organize itself politically looks toward transnationalism as well. Sullivan’s prophets, then, are those lonely voices of reason that have the courage to brave the loneliness of being, not the advanced guard, but the scouts of reason, adhering to the clarity of their vision and seeking to lead humanity toward its own good despite the prejudices and irrationality of the great masses lagging behind.

Conclusion Overall, we find in Sullivan an optimist who strives also to be a realist. His core faith is in the human capacity for reason, and he believes in the ability of reason to conquer ignorance. It is ignorance, not cupidity, that is the source of all evils, for it is ignorance that causes individuals to incorrectly separate their own well-being from that of others; this, in turn, leads to selfish actions that lead to suffering for all. When we put all the elements of Sullivan’s thinking together, we seem to come out with something like this: the individual and society exist in mutual dependence, neither of them possessing absolute existence and neither being possible without the other. Given this relationship of mutual dependence, the well-being of the individual is not separable from the well-being of society, so individual goods cannot be actually be separable from social goods. The guiding human faculty in determining what actions will be conducive to the optimal state of individual/social well-being (the two not existing, as with conservatives, in opposition, one to the other) is reason; therefore, what is reasonable is conducive to well-being, and what is unreasonable harms well-being. Individual human beings are the bearers of reason, and for that reason the ability (freedom) of individuals to

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exercise their faculties of reason unfettered is crucial to individual/social well-being. Moreover, this faculty of reason is what, more than anything else, makes human beings human. To Sullivan, the ideological challenges that humans face are the views that deny the mutually dependent relationship of the individual and the group and seek to subsume the relationship into one or the other of its terms, communism recognizing the true existence only of the collective and conservatism recognizing only the individual. Each side proclaims its own end of the spectrum as “good” and the other end as “evil.” In doing so, both of these views try to make real something that is impossible since neither the individual nor society can exist as independent phenomena; in trying to make the impossible real, both ideologies produce unnecessary suffering and forego the full possibilities of individual/social well-being because their proponents, being out of touch with reality, are unable to take advantage of the possibilities for humanity that are inherent in reality. Finally, McCarthyism is merely the most virulent and harmful form of ignorance on the individualistic side of the spectrum during the early 1950s, with communism playing that role on the communitarian side of the spectrum. Locked into a pattern of dualistic thinking that is inherently divorced from reality because of its failure to perceive that “individual” and “social” are complementary, not mutually exclusive, both these ideologies rely on the bogie of the opposite extreme of the spectrum to frighten people into voluntarily resigning their all-important capacity for reason. However, we can also see that by his exaltation of relativism as representing the essence of tolerance, reasonableness, and flexibility, he has painted himself into something of a logical corner, for if values are not to be judged by any absolute measure, then there is no basis for judging and rejecting any values at all, including those of one’s ideological opponents. Sullivan describes values as “codes of behavior that clearly arise out of the needs of a given community.” But what if one supposes that there are what are in effect two competing and mutually incompatible patterns of community of roughly the same size coexisting in the same polity? One might criticize the adherents of absolute values for not recognizing the relativistic version of truth, but, if we return to the Durkheimian understanding of holistic societies, one would also have to concede that their own absolutist version of reality (and their resistance to relativism) exists because it is meeting some need, psychic and social if not physical, which, in turn, in terms of the pragmatic standard of “working” for them, validates their beliefs by satisfying their need for a sense of place and security within a stable social order. It must also be noted that in the realm of holistic solidarity, reason is not the final arbiter of what is acceptable and what is not—at least, not Sullivan’s type of reason. The difference between the two types of solidarity can be seen clearly in their relationship to the punishment of crime: in a society ordered on the basis of individualism, the primary purpose of the punishment of crime is deterrence, i.e., to help

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stop the recurrence of crime and possibly to rehabilitate the offender. However, under holism the punishment of crime plays a different role; it reaffirms and recreates the integrity of society itself by bringing together its members in a ritual in which all share their abhorrence of that which disturbs the social fabric. So, Sullivan’s primary mistake—the primary mistake of liberals generally—is his belief that one can have access to the minds and understandings of all human beings through calm, objective reasonability. There is an unconscious charade on the part of pluralists of believing that all cultures, all worldviews, have their place. The fact that this is and must be a charade is exposed, however, by the fact that this tolerance is dependent either on those cultures’ being reasonable in a liberal sort of way, that is, by taking a “live and let live” approach to one’s own group and others, or else on the holistic group’s being small and weak enough to not pose any risk of it imposing its views on others. So, for example, if people are Muslims, Hindus, or Christians that is okay as long as they are “live and let live” Muslims, Hindus, or Christians, willing to allow others to find their own way to the truth and, perhaps, even better, honoring those other ways. Or if the holistic entity is a small group like the Amish, they can be tolerated and even cherished as a sort of living museum piece as long as they observe certain social norms (such as not sexually abusing children). But the essence of the holistic is that it is not pluralistic; its adherents believe that there is one true way, or else there would not be a whole at all, just a collection of more or less disjointed parts, that is, pluralism, with its attendant uncertainties. It is then up to the liberal to show these misguided souls, be they religious chauvinists or nationalist chauvinists or patriarchal, tribal chauvinists, why they should surrender their absolute values for the uncertainties of relativism: will such a surrender make them happier? Will it address those needs that make people opt for holistic models of society? When Sullivan urges people to liberate themselves from pre-conceived notions—notions handed down and often cherished by community and family—and to be free, he is also urging them to tear themselves out of a social context that defines one’s relationship with self and other and that provides those relationships and all the certainty and psychic security that go with that and to embrace the loneliness—and possible despair—of freedom. He is urging them, in fact, to give up their identities. There may be nobility and perhaps even majesty in this vision, but there is little comfort there. The stark dilemma is portrayed in Chapter Five of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor episode, where the Grand Inquisitor criticizes Jesus for offering humanity spiritual freedom while he (the Inquisitor), by enforcing conformity on the populace, offers them security. His fundamental argument is that with freedom comes uncertainty and with uncertainty comes unhappiness. Before banishing him, the Inquisitor justifies his actions, telling Jesus, “The most painful secrets of

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their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy.”143

Notes 1. One comment before continuing: Sullivan was in the process during these years of reading and listening to a variety of liberal thinkers. Where he cites these approvingly, their thoughts shall be treated as part of his own ideological landscape. 2. Paul Wilson Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 17, 1955, 2. 3. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 30, 1954, 2. 4. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 10, 1955, 6. 5. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 17, 1955, 2 and October 7, 1954, 2. 6. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 3, 1955, 2. 7. Ibid. 8. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, NYC, 1920), 193–200. 9. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 17, 1954. 10. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, January 7, 1954, 2. 11. Ibid. 12. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 7, 1954, 2. 13. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 6, 1954, 2. 14. Ibid. 15. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 7, 1954, 2. 16. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 12, 1953, 2. 17. Ibid. 18. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 6, 1954, 2. 19. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 12, 1953, 2. 20. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 7, 1954, 2. 21. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 6, 1954, 2. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 7, 1954, 2. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 12, 1953, 2. 30. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 7, 1954, 2. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 21, 1954, 2. 34. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 7, 1954, 2. 35. Ibid. 36. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 12, 1953, 2. 37. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 7, 1954. 38. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 12, 1953, 2. 39. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 6, 1954, 2. 40. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 12, 1953, 2. 41. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 16, 1954, 2. 42. Ibid.

198 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

Mapping the Liberal Mind Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 6, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 7, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 21, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 17, 1955, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 17, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 6, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 12, 1953, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 17, 1954, 2. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 25, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 23, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 17, 1955, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 17, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 17, 1955, 2. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 17, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 3, 1955, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 21, 1954, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 13, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 6, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 13, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 7, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 13, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 30, 1954, 2. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 13, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 30, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 13, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 30, 1954, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 13, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 30, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, May 13, 1954, 2. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 2, 1954, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 30, 1954, 2. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 2, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 30, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 2, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 30, 1954, 2.

Mapping the Liberal Mind 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, November 12, 1953, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, January 7, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, November 12, 1953, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 23, 1954, 2. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 9, 1954, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 25, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 9, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, November 12, 1953, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 30, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, November 12, 1953, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 25, 1954, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 17, 1955, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 25, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, September 23, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 25, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 3, 1955, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 25, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 3, 1955, 2. William Ernest Hocking served as professor of philosophy at Yale (1908– 1913) and Harvard from 1913 until his retirement in 1943. His contribution to philosophical discourse, sometimes described as “negative pragmatism” (“That which does not work is not true”), also draws upon idealism, empiricism, and naturalism. He sought to move beyond modern liberalism by radicalizing the liberty and power of the individual, and argued for the value of Christianity in the construction of world civilization. Hocking’s key writings include The Meaning of God in Human Experience: A Philosophic Study of Religion (1912), Morale and Its Enemies (1918), Human Nature and Its Remaking (1923), Man and State (1926), Types of Philosophy (1929), Thoughts on Life and Death (1937), The Lasting Elements of Individualism (1937), Science and the Idea of God (1944), The Coming World Civilization (1956) and The Meaning of Immortality in Human Experience (1957). A William Ernest Hocking Reader, with Commentary (2004) was coedited by John Lachs and D. Micah Hester. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, January 7, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, March 17, 1955, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 10, 1955, 6. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, October 21, 1954, 2. Ibid. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 10, 1955, 6. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 2, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 10, 1955, 6. Ibid.

200 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

Mapping the Liberal Mind Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 2, 1954, 2. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 10, 1955, 6. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 2, 1954, 2. Ibid. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 10, 1955, 6. Ibid. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Constance Garnett, trans. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005), 235.

Conclusion Vital Center or Excluded Middle?

But we have now posited that it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be, and by this means have shown that this is the most indisputable of all principles. Aristotle, Metaphysics 4.iv A man who stands in the middle of the road gets hit going both ways. Unidentified woman1

On July 23, 1988, speaking on radio from his ranch in Santa Barbara, California, where he had been on vacation for a week, President Ronald Reagan gave a memorable address in response to the Democratic National Convention, which had just nominated Governor Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts as its presidential candidate. Reagan’s target audience was obviously not liberal. Nor was it especially Republican—there were no ringing affirmations of core conservative values here to rally the troops. No, he was just talking in a folksy, informal way to a mythological creature, Mr., Mrs., and Miss (no Ms.’s probably) average American, probably not a city dweller, but if so, one who understands good, wholesome small-town values, a reasonable, optimistic person who, hearing vicious Democratic attacks on their nice president, will shake their heads and agree with his mild observation that “[s]ome people just don’t seem to learn.” The attack that followed was all the more startling in its crudity, but it had been introduced with such bland goodwill, with such strong affirmations of identification with the listeners, that the transition was barely noticeable. Having obliquely branded his “liberal opposition” as gloomy, antiAmerican doomsayers by claiming that to them it was “midnight in America,” he finished with a devastating attack, saying: this year they’ve learned one lesson: They’re covering their tracks. You’ll never hear that “L” word—liberal—from them. They’ve put on political trench coats and dark glasses and slipped their platform into a plain brown wrapper.

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The metaphors—both direct and implied and delivered in the bland voice of that friendly guy next door—are powerful, vulgar, and harsh. Most comments on the speech have focused on the transformation of the word “liberal” into an obscenity; however, there is much more going on here than that. Liberals are depicted as classic perverts—people whose perversion is secretive, shameful, and dirty, flashers and/or purveyors of pornography, people peddling goods that must be hidden from decent Americans or who have purchased goods that are too shameful to expose to public view. Everything about them is hidden and shady; they wear dark glasses so that no one will know whom they are, and they wear trench coats to hide the penis they intend to expose at the critical moment when their victim will be caught unaware. Liberals are being depicted as everything that Americans will consider to be disreputable and vile—cowardly (hidden and disguised) perverts who prey on unsuspecting victims. Even the fact that the implied perversion is exposure works against them, even more sordid and pathetic than the more direct, though more horrific, damaging, and hurtful, rape. What Democrats—liberals all in the terms of this discourse—stand for—their platform—is so disreputable that, like a dirty magazine, it must be kept hidden in a “plain brown wrapper.” This is especially interesting rhetoric coming from the man who had begun his speech identifying with his audience as a plain American who, like his listeners, was “shaking [his] head,” dismayed at the “personal attacks” speakers at the Democratic convention had leveled at Republicans.2 Yet the language relating to perversion is just allusive enough so that the rhetor does not have to take responsibility for his metaphors and can avoid the notice, not only of his presumably prudish audience, but even of his targets, the liberals themselves. Good liberal that he was, Dukakis answered with facts. Informed that Reagan had accused him of vagueness on the issues, Dukakis told reporters on his campaign plane, “We’ll send him 50 position papers and about a hundred speeches.” Answering a Republican charge that a Dukakis administration would attempt to raise taxes, he said of Reagan: This is the President who has raised taxes five times in seven years, who just signed a $6 billion tax increase two weeks ago to finance the catastrophic-health-insurance bill. If he signs the trade bill, and I expect he will, he’ll be signing his sixth tax increase in seven years. So who’s kidding whom?3 The metaphor triumphed over the facts, and the effects of the “L” word are with liberals still, so much so that for purposes of self-identification until quite recently they have tended to shift to the word “progressive,” a label that, with its association with Henry Wallace’s communist-supported 1948 presidential campaign, would have been deadly in the early 1950s. Despite a few attempts such as the October 26, 1988, New York

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Times full-page advertisement for liberalism entitled “A Reaffirmation of Principle,” signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers, and businesspeople, including Daniel Bell, J. K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Irving Howe, Eudora Welty, and Robert Penn Warren, by and large, liberals simply folded under the attack, and, as historian Timothy Garton Ash—hoping for the word’s rehabilitation under President Obama—wrote not long ago, liberalism remains “a pejorative term denoting—to put the matter a tad frivolously—some unholy marriage of big government and fornication.”4 But, as we’ve already noted and as Reagan’s repeated references to “trenchcoat liberals” demonstrates, Ash misstates the matter—the word “fornication” must be replaced with “perversion.” And, as we have been detailing, throughout the early 1950s, though much stronger politically than in the 1980s, liberals had also been on the defensive, reactive, not proactive, and, consequently, rhetorically weak, not strong. Attempts to strike back at their tormentors occasionally took the feeble form of tit for tat, trying to equate conservative anticommunism with fascism just as liberal views had been conflated with communism, but Paul Wilson Sullivan commented on the “futility of calling McCarthy ‘fascist’” in the face of the existence of an actual communist “underground secret conspiracy.” In part, then, this may have been because the fascist threat had receded while the communist threat loomed, in part because communism had been analytically merged with fascism under the umbrella title of “totalitarianism,”5 and in part because the tactic of labeling political opponents as fascistic was one widely adopted by the communists themselves; when liberals did this, then, it just made them sound like the communists from whom they sought to disentangle themselves. Even when victories, such as the defeat of Homer Richey, were won, those victories were merely a successful warding off of an attack, never a victory won on the enemy’s ideological soil, never an attack on the root beliefs and assumptions of conservatism. And a look at the words used by the antagonists themselves reveals another, perhaps more profound, difficulty for those propounding liberal views. As we have already seen, in their October 1951 attack on Arthur Morse, the Minute Women had written, “Mr. Morse and his so-called ‘liberal’ cohorts do not realize that they are the Pied Pipers of the 20th century, leading the oncoming generations to a human ant society.” We can ignore the fact that if we take these remorselessly mixed metaphors at face value, they suggest that liberals were leading Americans who were being likened to Hamlin’s rats to what is apparently the even more dire fate of transformation into ants. The main point is the fear expressed here: a human ant society. What is it about this picture that is so disturbing? Surely it is the threat of the loss of individuality. Our usual sense of an ant is that of a being that is entirely devoted to fulfilling a function; the folk version of knowledge about ants—the kind of person that a non-biologist like myself might know or

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might think he knows—suggests that the number of choices they make on their own behalf is minimal, that their behavior is rigidly restricted and almost completely oriented to the survival of the group, with no room for self-gratification. In other words, in the average human view, the normal ant doesn’t live for him- or herself, doesn’t even get to be him- or herself. Linked to Bob Young’s fear, expressed in Chapter 1, of people ending up “as nonentities or automatons or nonexistent,” the fundamental threat, then, is the loss of self, or, at the very least, the loss of self-expression. So that’s where liberals are taking us all with their Pied Pipering. The liberals, both student and adult, in the texts we have examined seem to be—just as they were at a later date when Reagan launched his rhetorical assault—at a loss regarding how to deal with this; after all, they see themselves as exemplary individualists, far less conformist, far less mentally stifling, far more tolerant than their right-wing tormentors. And, as we have also seen, liberal responses to these attacks comprise mostly claims of innocence combined with protestations concerning the bad behavior of their accusers. In other words, liberals don’t attack conservatism per se, just the behavior of conservatives—there is a big difference between these two actions. To attack conservatism and the values associated with it would be to mount a genuine offensive that might offer some actual hope of victory; however, liberals during McCarthy period simply did not do it. The reason they didn’t is because they couldn’t, and the reason they couldn’t is twofold: first, they did not understand that they did not face an opponent but an enemy, an enemy bent, not on their conversion through argument, but on their destruction; second, in order to mount an ideological attack on someone else, one must have an ideology of one’s own to propose as the correct alternative. But, as we are about to see in some depth, liberals eschew ideology, and this forces them willy-nilly to be reactive only. Metaphorically we could say that liberals have walls and a roof—programs—but no foundation—ideology—to support them. In the last chapter, we saw a college student, Paul Wilson Sullivan, explicitly rejecting the postulation of absolutes and espousing relativism. In this respect, as a young liberal, he was only following the example of his elders. What I will be arguing now is that just those things that liberals abhor—a metaphysical stance built on a postulated absolute—are tactical necessities if one is to have a political ideology that can function as an effective basis for conducting the “war by other means.” To make the point, I will begin with a consideration of the nature of absolutes in politics and the logical difficulties posed by them. To help elucidate the issues around ideologies as rallying points for political success, I will also look at the ideas of two well-known theorists of political ideology, political scientist Michael Freeden and social scientist George Lakoff, both of whom seek to bypass the issue of the absolute, and I will demonstrate why their theories are inadequate in accounting for (1) the function that political

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ideologies actually perform and (2) the way in which they perform that function. Finally, I will propose an alternative view of political ideologies, arguing that ontological assertions are, in fact, basic to political ideologies, and that those who renounce metaphysics do so at their peril. So . . . When liberal sociologist Daniel Bell proclaimed the “end of ideology” in his 1960 book of that name, he believed that this was the proclamation of a victory of sorts, not a victory for “our side” over “their side” but a general victory for rationality, common sense, and moderation. As Bell put it: The end of ideology is not—should not be—the end of utopia as well. If anything, one can begin anew the discussion of utopia only by being aware of the trap of ideology. The point is that ideologists are “terrible simplifiers.” Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits. One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae. And when these beliefs are suffused by apocalyptic fervor, ideas become weapons, and with dreadful results. There is now, more than ever, some need for utopia, in the sense that men need—as they have always needed—some vision of their potential, some manner of fusing passion with intelligence. Yet the ladder to the City of Heaven can no longer be a “faith ladder,” but an empirical one: a utopia has to specify where one wants to go, how to get there, the costs of the enterprise, and some realization of, and justification for the determination of who is to pay.6 The question, however, that was left unanswered is what is it that is to be realized and why? We have seen Daniel Bell urging that “there is now, more than ever, some need for utopia” but without any consideration of why. And for whom? Presumably for everybody, but again, why? Liberals have assumed that the answers to these questions are self-evident, but they clearly are not, or else everyone would be liberal. We already saw in Chapter 3 that in its appeal to the voting public, modern conservatism represents a package of mutually contradictory ideologies; however, the tendency in modern political thinking has been to accept these packages at face value, as single things, and then to try to “preserve the appearances” with an explanation that holds the package together. For example, in his major work, Ideologies and Political Theory, Michael Freeden seeks to rescue ideology from its “unsavoury” reputation among political theorists as either “distorted and power-serving political thinking” or, alternatively, “a simplistic classificatory label for broadly based political belief-systems and the historical traditions in which they unfold.”7 Because political thought is a phenomenon “reflecting cultural as well as logical constraints,”8 because these cultural elements, though integral to ideologies, are not given consideration in political philosophy, and further, because, unlike political philosophy, ideologies have as

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one of their “central functions” the important task of linking the worlds of political thought and political action,9 Freeden emphatically and persuasively argues that “[t]he thinking encapsulated in ideologies deserves examination in its own right, not merely for what it masks.”10 Freeden suggests that this exploration lends itself to three possible scholarly perspectives: (1) a historically oriented approach that seeks to discover how and in what circumstances a particular set of political views evolved; (2) a functional approach that pinpoints the role or purpose of an ideology or ideologies within a particular social framework; and (3) a semantic approach that seeks to determine “the implications and the insights of a particular set of political views, in terms of the conceptual connections it forms.”11 Ideologies and Political Theory is an examination of the last of these and, through a close examination of political language, offers an interpretative framework through which to comprehend the concrete manifestations of individual political ideologies. Though he explicitly dissociates himself from structuralism (preferring the term he borrows from linguistics, “morphology,” to “structure” in part because of his “desire not to associate with any particular stream” of scholarship),12 Freeden’s work is nonetheless structural—though not structuralist—in its general approach. His semantic concerns involve him in an extensive investigation of the morphological attributes of ideologies; these he variously describes as “particular patterned clusters and configurations of political concepts,” “complex constructs through which specific meanings are imparted to the wide range of political concepts they inevitably employ,” and also as “the macroscopic structural arrangement that attributes meaning to a range of mutually defining political concepts.” In other words, in form, ideologies are structured compound phenomena composed of building blocks, which are the political concepts. These political concepts—key political ideas such as liberty, justice, power, etc.—comprise, in turn, the “main foci of political thought.”13 Clearly, the specification of the exact features of these building blocks is critical to the success of Freeden’s project. He objects to reducing political concepts to “minimum components” on the basis that such a process renders them “entirely vacuous,” turning them into “form devoid of content.” He also rejects the views of those political theorists who, like Bhikhu Parekh, see political concepts as clearly identifiable cores or nuclei of meaning surrounded by “hazy circumference[s]” on the grounds that “[i]f a core implies a pivotal and specific element, lucidly spelt out and able to stand on its own,” then no such element can be located in political concepts.14 Finally, with regard to the study of ideologies, he questions the applicability of the work of political philosophers who, like Felix Oppenheim, Gerald MacCallum, and William E. Connolly, strive to arrive at accurate descriptive formulae for political concepts; Freeden argues that “[t]he analysis of political concepts is not . . . most usefully pursued by projecting their logical permutations and ethical possibilities

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in the abstract, often attached to universalizable models”15 because “[t]he ensuing simulation bears only partial resemblance to the prevalent usages of terms.” It is not that Freeden wants to dispense with the insights of political philosophers altogether; however, he finds their abstract formulae to be of limited value in the analysis of a type of political thinking (ideology) that is not primarily concerned with internal consistency. Therefore, he would prefer to locate political concepts “within the patterns in which they actually appear”16 and so “bridge the gap between model-building and a non-prescriptive interpretation and analysis of the thought-behaviour of individuals engaged in thinking about politics.”17 Freeden, then, breaks away from traditional approaches and treats political concepts as compound thought-objects that acquire meaning through their positions in time (historical traditions of thought and belief), socio-geographic space (the “pluralist disparities of culture”), and specific social structures (their “particular location within a constellation of other political concepts”).18 Political concepts themselves are compounds constructed out of words. Following Saussure, Freeden treats words as linguistic units whose meaning is indeterminate, dependent on how they are used and therefore only empirically ascertainable. An identifiable phenomenon requires some identifying mark: Freeden suggests that political concepts gain their specificity through two features, the first being a constant “ineliminable” component and the second being a limited set of variable “quasi-contingent factors.” The choice of the word “ineliminable” is significant because in keeping with his Saussurean position, Freeden seeks to avoid an essentialist stance; therefore, he avoids terms such as “core meaning” and is careful to point out that ineliminable features are “not intrinsic to, or logically necessary to, the meaning of the word to which they attach” but rather “result from actual linguistic usage.” The reason these ineliminable elements are necessary to the coherence of a concept is simply because “all known usages of the concept employ it, so that its absence would deprive the concept of intelligibility and communicability.” As an example, Freeden suggests that “non-constraint” acts as the ineliminable element in the concept of liberty, even though under certain specific circumstances one might find it more expedient to regard selfdevelopment or autonomy as “more central or core elements in terms of their importance for human and social life.”19 Freeden argues that by themselves these ineliminable features are too bare, too primitive, to be useful; they “cannot carry the concept on their own, that is, the concept cannot be reduced to its ineliminable component.”20 They require association with quasi-contingent factors, “a nonrandom . . . collection of additional components that are secured to that vacuous ‘de facto’ core in a limited number of recognizable patterns.” Without these further components to “flesh it out,” the ineliminable factor remains “vacuous, devoid of content and meaning.”21

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These secondary features are of two kinds: those characterized by “logical adjacency” and those by “cultural adjacency.” Logical adjacency refers to those related concepts that must be brought into play to make the bare notion embodied in the ineliminable element meaningful in various concrete situations. As examples, Freeden mentions that links with related concepts such as autonomy, self-determination, power, and self-development may be necessary addenda to non-constraint if the idea of liberty is to have any real utility to political agents. However, not all the logically adjacent elements will be appropriate to all intentions and situations—this is one area where essential contestability comes into play as one logically adjacent element is privileged over another according to the user’s circumstances and purpose. The inclusion and exclusion of specific logically adjacent elements is likely to be mediated by cultural adjacency, i.e., a political concept’s relation to a society’s particular history and social structure. Culturally adjacent factors—arising from the social practices, institutional patterns, technologies, ethical systems, and other thought systems of a given society— are only contingently related to the logical elements of a concept, yet they can, and usually do, influence which logically adjacent elements are emphasized in a particular cultural setting. Culturally adjacent factors can also lead to the establishment of illogical adjacent connections or override logical adjacency altogether. Culturally adjacent elements further break down into two types: (1) culturally influenced preferences that lead to the privileging of one logically adjacent concept over another when the two are incompatible, and (2) elements that “do not follow logically from the ineliminable components of a concept, but are regarded in ordinary usage as legitimate, if not indispensable.”22 The great virtue of Freeden’s analysis is that it combines precision with suppleness, offering a mechanism that bridges the gulf between general principles and specific circumstances. Rather than committing himself to rigid formulae that require constant modification in response to endless possible objections, he has evolved a flexible treatment of political concepts as primitive particles of meaning that—rather like molecules—can form bonds with related particles of meaning in a variety of ways, in response to specific circumstances and intentions, to form fully articulated, yet adaptable, systems of meaning. However, because of the inherent limitations of their content and structure, these particles—again like molecules—are also limited in both the type and number of other connections that can be forged between them and other particles. The difficulties arise from the fact that Freeden under-emphasizes two important points: first, in politics one of the critical functions of ideology is to garner support, and in a democracy that must translate into getting votes; while a scholar may wish to avoid essentialism, the voting public, not being composed in its entirety of academics, is essentialist in its thinking and beliefs, and a viable ideology must incorporate

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and reflect that; second, political concepts—and especially their ineliminable elements—are structurally unstable, and the effort to resolve that instability is a source of the dynamism of human social existence. The constant flux of conflict and harmony in human relationships on both the micro and macro levels arises from the fact that every relationship— including those embodied in political concepts such as freedom—operates under a irresoluble structural strain arising from an ever-present polar tension. It is not that Freeden does not perceive the dialectical dimension of political concepts; he recognizes, for example, that “non-constraint entails a relationship between an object and a ‘force’ that has the potential of restricting an activity, or oppressing the sense of space, of the object. Dialectically, the notion of non-constraint is only possible when its opposite, constraint, is postulated.”23 He further sees that the internal dialectical tensions contained by political concepts “draw them inevitably into practical contradictions,” thus preventing their full actual expression. However, he goes on to suggest that these tensions are neutralized through the concept’s being “brutally pruned by means of cultural constraint,” thus being enabled to “contain” the contradictions. He believes that this escape from the consequences of dialectical instability is possible because “[c]ulture, unlike logic, is unsystematic and multifarious.”24 One might ask whether the consequences of these irreconcilable polar tensions are evaded so easily. First of all, since—as Freeden acknowledges— we cannot even conceive of constraint separately from non-constraint (or freedom separately from imprisonment or order separately from chaos), it seems that we are dealing with single but double-sided thought-objects that could be dubbed constraint/non-constraint, order/chaos, etc. We make a mistake if we believe that we can isolate either of the sides, even analytically, since each exists only by virtue of and in relation to the other. This might well force a modification of Freeden’s analysis of the morphological features of political concepts to the extent that since these concepts are dual and since that duality is central, analysis of political thought must necessarily be structured around this duality. However, as we have already seen, Freeden, though he recognizes this duality, trivializes and more or less dismisses it. This is his key error because a semantic approach to the analysis of social phenomena must begin with the realization that language—and consequently our entire way of thinking about things—is, in fact, inherently dualistic, analytically separating not only entities from each other but even act from actor, verb from noun, characteristic from a thing that is characterized. If we take up this dualism in a more considered way and delve deeper into it, we can identify one polar relationship that is central to all political thought and action in all human societies: that between self and other, subject and object, or, even more elementally, “same” and “different.” Neither self nor other must necessarily be singular; either could be an individual or a group to which

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an individual belongs (me versus you, my group versus your group, me versus your group, my group versus you). If we return to the constraint/non-constraint duality, we can see that, as subjectively experienced, non-constraint will always be associated with the subjective end of the polarity while constraint will always be connected with the objective end, something that constrains us. However, this formulation must be refined a little more: tension arises not only from the gulf between a subject and its object but also from the fact that an individual is inevitably in a dual relationship with any group of which he or she is a voluntary member. Insofar as we are voluntarily part of the group, it is a part of our subjectivity and part of our potential; yet insofar as the group remains other, it is an object and a source of possible oppression. So, as individuals we stand apart from the group, while as group members we are a part of the group and identify with it. We want to and must associate with others in various ways, yet we also want to protect ourselves from possible or actual encroachments. Our dilemma arises because neither individual nor group can exist alone; at the very minimum, no individual human being can be born and grow up without parents and caregivers, just as no group can exist without the individuals who comprise it. One of the peculiar and politically significant features of dialectical polarities is that although they represent conceptual extremes that by their nature are incapable of manifestation in their pure forms, nonetheless, because we can conceive them as pure forms, these extremes haunt us as possible realities and mold our attitudes and actions in accordance with the extreme fears and hopes connected with them. Moreover, the conceptual and social problems concerning general principles such as “freedom” are compounded by the human propensity to attribute reality to general principles abstracted from concrete experience. On the basis of actually experienced relative states, human beings infer absolute states; yet, these absolute states have no ascertainable real existence. Ideal forms such as points, lines, squares, circles, and cubes do not exist in the natural world; they are abstractions, yet we treat them as actual and are able to use them to manipulate our world. In the same way, freedom is an abstraction that has no real existence in the human world but is rather a generalized simplification of certain aspects of our experience in that world. Finally, conceptually the logically adjacent concepts of non-constraint, self-development, and autonomy converge at an ideational point or moment in which an entity is not bound by conditions yet has control of them. As a point, it has no dimensionality and as a moment has no duration. In short, it has no material manifestation in the world of human experience, yet freedom and its opposite—absolute bondage and imprisonment—act as powerful tools of social orientation, so powerful that we treat them as existent.

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It is this psychological factor that allows for the political and social phenomenon of the demonization of the “other.” For example, as Bernard Bailyn showed in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the tension between the concepts of power and liberty as conceived by North Americans has played a dynamic role in the molding of the national political life since colonial times.25 Now, the fully realized manifestation of “power” would be omnipotence, an attribute usually reserved for a deity. Similarly, liberty, insofar as in its extreme form it represents absolute freedom from conditions, could only apply to a deity. However, as actual properties of human existence these extremes can only exist as concepts—fantasies in fact—not as concrete realities. No individual human being can have the kind of coercive power posited by genuinely absolute power—the unlimited ability to bend all others to one’s will—because large-scale human power over others of necessity requires the acquiescence and support of at least some other people, each with their own wills and aims. Similarly, complete liberty—utter freedom from the will of any other—is an impossibility for humans unless they are willing (and able) to live in complete isolation. Even then, they must be raised by families that will condition them and so impinge on their freedom. In short, so long as people live socially, interdependence is the unavoidable rule, and no individual can attain the extreme polarities of either power or liberty, however far they may move in that direction. Nevertheless, though these extremes are actual impossibilities, they represent psychic realities insofar as they represent the extremes of our inner fears and hopes—nightmares and dreams that we respond to as though they could come true. These are not unconnected to the phenomenal world and in fact play themselves out in it to the extent that conflicting external conditions allow. Thus, we find that people—be they monarchs, politicians, or madmen—sometimes do strive for the chimera of absolute power. On a more day-to-day level we find an ongoing discourse of extremes—freedom and slavery, dream and nightmare, with all their concomitant emotionality—running through American political life from pre-Revolutionary times to the present day. The social, political, and historical importance and consequence of this fact are that the mutual incompatibility of these concepts creates an area of intellectual confusion and potential panic. The psychic reality of this polarity, along with its attendant hopes and fears, also becomes an effective tool for mobilizing masses of people for action in circumstances in which a more modulated and realistic approach might leave most people placidly untouched. For example, Bailyn points out that slavery—the state, according to one 18th century writer, of “being wholly under the power and control of another as to our actions and properties”26—was “a central concept in eighteenth-century political discourse. As the absolute political evil, it appears in every statement of political principle, in every

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discussion of constitutionalism or legal rights, in every exhortation to resistance.”27 No scholar today would seriously argue that George III or any of his ministers had any intention of reducing Americans to such an abject state, nor was there concrete contemporary evidence of any such extreme goal in their policies; yet the threat seemed real to many of those in opposition to the government and, as a tool of mass mobilization, was even invoked in the Declaration of Independence.28 Numerous similar examples might be adduced up to and including the beliefs and fears embodied in 20th century anticommunism. Michael Paul Rogin himself had acknowledged, while labeling McCarthyism a normal manifestation of American politics, that “[p]olitics alone does not explain McCarthyism; but the relevant sociopsychology is that which underpins normal American politics, not that of radicals and outsiders.”29 Between 1970 and 1994 a series of four books— Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab’s The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1977, Murray B. Levin’s Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression (first published in 1971), David H. Bennett’s The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (1988),30 and Joel Kovel’s Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (1994)31—appeared that accepted Rogin’s premise that these events were in some sense normal and took up the challenge of trying to explain the “relevant sociopsychology.” For even if McCarthyism as a particular political phenomenon could be explained as an extreme manifestation of Republican conservatism, the receptivity of a large portion of the public to its apparently irrational premises still remained to be explained. These works varied widely in their analyses: for example, in The Politics of Unreason Lipset and Raab identified the pluralist mentality with the best of what America had to offer, asserting that “[t]he genius of American society is that it has legitimized ambiguity.”32 They blamed American political intolerance and extremism on a contrapuntal theme of moralistic “monism” that runs through American society. On the other hand, in Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression, Murray B. Levin took a diametrically opposite point of view; looking at the great red scare of the early 1920s he found that the scare and its accompanying repression followed traditional avenues of American pluralism, being a “manifestation of interest group politics” and a “product of coalitions, mutual aid, pressure, and even bargaining.”33 Levin concluded that the phenomenon that he called “political hysteria,” far from being an outbreak of the dangerously moralistic masses, was actually a combination of “conscious elite contrivance” in response to perceived threats to their favored social position and “spontaneous and largely unconscious mass response.”34

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The Problem: The Irrational in American Society A concern about the deleterious effects of irrationality on American society lies at the heart of all these treatments of the ideology of the far right. Most of the titles—The Politics of Unreason, Political Hysteria in America, The Party of Fear—announce the fact that the authors believe that something is dreadfully wrong and needs correcting. In The Politics of Unreason, Lipset and Raab go on to clarify the source of their worry, writing: there can be little doubt that both of us are deeply committed opponents of extremist movements, both of the left and the right. We are both Jews of the generation of the holocaust. We were politically conscious during the period in which right-wing extremism, as practiced in Germany and other parts of Europe, murdered six million Jews. This is a fact, which must affect all that we write, say, and do about extremism.35 Echoing Daniel Bell, Joel Kovel highlights the essential irrationality of his subject when he notes that “this nation, of all the capitalist powers the least threatened by Communism, has been the most floridly anticommunist.”36,37 He emphasizes the ethical importance of his subject, writing: Millions of innocents lie dead, whole societies have been laid to waste, a vigorous domestic labor movement has been castrated, and the political culture of the United States has been frozen in a retrograde position—all for the sake of overcoming Communism.38 The scholar who seeks to explain the irrational is engaged in a paradoxical activity since to be explicable it must be, in some degree at least, subject to rational explanation, in other words, rational. The difficulties of the topic emerge in the language of the scholars themselves; for example, the word “hysteria” employed by both Lipset and Raab and Levin tells us little except that the user of it regards the phenomenon in question as being (a) bad, (b) emotionally charged, and (c) irrational. Levin almost throws up his hands in his despair when he defines political hysteria as a “national panic without real cause.”39 Levin describes “political hysteria” as characterized by a “loss of customary political self-control” and a “very high degree of misperception” manifesting in a “crusade to eliminate an imaginary threat.”40 Thus, the essence of the great red scare of 1919–1920 was “almost universal belief in the imminent destruction of American civilization by a highly organized, brilliantly directed, and well-financed Bolshevik conspiracy in America, which, in fact, did not exist.” “This,” he tells us, “is poor ‘reality testing’ on a grand scale.”41

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How the Irrational Manifests: Conspiracy Theory and Demonization There is general agreement among these authors that an emotionally charged irrationality is the essential nature of political extremism of the right; they also show a broad consensus on how this irrationality manifests. The essence of its expression is in what Lipset and Raab characterize as a threefold comprehensive conspiracy theory: it is comprehensive spatially in that it is international; it is comprehensive temporally in that it “stretches back in history and promises to stretch ahead interminably”; and it is comprehensive in design in that “the political collusion involved in the conspiracy is held to be the explanatory factor in understanding history.”42 The supposed conspirators are invariably subjected to a process of demonization. Lipset and Raab explain that The monistic impulse . . . in the context of the American political metaphor, must be legitimated by rendering illegitimate those who are to be ruled out of the market place. Enter the imputation of deliberate evil, rather than lack of wisdom; enter the elements of absolutism, moralism, and conspiracy; and enter, of course, the conspiracy target.43 The conspirators are generally characterized by these conservatives as a small group of evil people who are able to manipulate the people who are ‘soft’ and ‘seduced’ by the “opiates of welfare and propaganda.”44 They are often intellectuals, a fact that “explains their ability to manipulate the minds of the mass” and that “marks them off from the mass and helps to characterize them as both secret and alien, dealing as they do in arcane subjects.”45 Levin, too, emphasizes the secret aspect of the conspiracy, pointing out that “periods of political hysteria depend upon the production of substantial levels of anxiety and the secret aspect of the conspiracy is well suited to produce anticipations of danger.” Secrecy is, of course, linked to the unknown, which, according to Levin, is intrinsically “frightening and threatening.”46 The essential fearfulness of the right is particularly emphasized by Bennett, who, it will be remembered, characterizes the right wing as “the party of fear.” The demonizing, de-humanizing process is vividly reflected in the invective used in describing the supposed conspirators, who are “portrayed as germ, infection, vermin, lice, rat, or snake in the grass. The growth of the conspiratorial power is likened to a plague or epidemic—a flooding of hideous and pestilential sickness and evil which can only be halted by extraordinary precautions and extreme solutions.”47 Levin goes on to Freudian speculations, suggesting that “[s]ome of the characteristics of the conspirator are characteristics of the id. The conspirator and the id have

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unlimited and magical power.”48 He further suggests that the conspirator is the “hated and feared secret self, finally out of control. And perhaps this projection is one source of the anxiety upon which the hysteria builds and it explains the pleasure and intensity of the pursuit.”49 There is some suggestion here that the conspirator is the object of dual emotions, hatred and attraction. Levin speculates that the conspirator represents the “hated and feared secret self, finally out of control,”50 while Kovel suggests that “[o]ne hates reds in order not to face up to the attraction they signify.”51

The Source of the Irrational: The Search for Social Cohesion and the National Identity Crisis In The Party of Fear, David Bennett suggests that the source of right-wing political extremism in America lies in a search for social cohesion in the absence of a sense of “authoritative” national community. Both he and Levin agree that, lacking deeply ingrained traditional institutions such as crown and hereditary class, Americans have suffered from a sort of collective long-term identity crisis. Bennett points to the reduced influence of family and church in a highly mobile society marked by a democratic and egalitarian ethos as further factors that have helped make any sense of collective identity extremely tenuous. Levin also delves into this in great detail, making a connection between the ability to orient oneself in a social context and the establishment of any kind of personal identity whatsoever. He points out that In a culture which places great emphasis on equality, and which does not have traditional hierarchical differentiations, it becomes difficult to distinguish yourself very much from others, it becomes difficult to locate yourself in space and time, it becomes difficult to know, with a high degree of certainty, who you are.52 De Tocqueville figures prominently in Political Hysteria in America, with Levin making extensive reference to the Frenchman’s comments on the social effects of American egalitarianism. It may be recalled that de Tocqueville pointed out the paradoxically potent effect of mass opinion on the individual in a society in which that individual, though free from undue influence by others taken singly, is exposed “alone and unprotected” to “a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.”53 Thus, as Levin puts it, though “[o]n the one hand one feels entitled to differentiate oneself from one’s peers and the rest of society; on the other hand, the very equality which allows this consideration mitigates against its implementation.”54 This power of the mass, he claims, imposes a uniformity of culture and personality that creates one-dimensional people and leads to a power of consensus that amounts to a sort of “American absolutism.”55 The larger social effect of this, as

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de Tocqueville suggested, is to nullify the potential for a genuine sense of community in favor of social atomization. Equality dissolves social bonds, producing “an aggregate of rootless, undifferentiated, and anarchic individuals—a mass without form or consciousness of self.”56 Add a rapidly changing physical and social environment and you have a fine source of identity confusion, instability, rootlessness, and personal insecurity. Yet this very sense of alienation produces the search for social identification: the problem posed is what is to be the basis for such identification? One answer, according to both Bennett and Levin, is a personal identification with the nation, America. Bennett points out that for the members of the “party of fear” this led to a belief that “[t]hey were special and superior because they were part of the great nation; if its perfection was tarnished, their lives would be diminished. From the very start it was ‘America: love it or leave it.’”57 However, the very elements that made people insecure to begin with— the constant inflow of immigrants in particular—made it difficult to say exactly what America was. Here lay the appeal of the antialien and anti-leftist organizations: people could find “closeness, community, and authority” within a “subculture and call it ‘America.’ . . . as members of a ‘movement,’ they could escape the loneliness of an individualism they glorified and find fellowship in the ranks of a manageable brotherhood.” Further, “Americans could take comfort in being part of a national community of those who shared belief in a common system of values.”58 Levin adds more complexity to Bennett’s analysis. He suggests that when local bonds are weak, people have a greater need to identify with a larger whole. With only a weak sense of belonging inhering in the structures of daily existence in a society in constant flux, Levin sees the nation filling the role of a wider family. However, a family is a relatively small, identifiable, biological unit, and a heterogeneous unit like the United States poses certain obvious challenges to the person who would identify with it on this basis. Thus, America must be transformed into something more abstract than its land and its people; it is projected as an “American way of life,” and American institutions and values become the foundation for a national identity. Furthermore, Levin claims, the institutions and values singled out as being central to the national identity and exalted as the best the world has to offer are, in the political arena, those connected with representative government as embodied in American institutions and, in the economic sphere, those connected with capitalism, the work ethic, and the conviction that with hard work one can get ahead. Levin studied with Louis Hartz, and he embraces, lock, stock, and barrel, the Hartzian liberal consensus thesis as expounded in The Liberal Tradition in America. Thus, he agrees with his mentor that “[t]he American identity and perspective is liberalism—Locke in politics and Smith in economics.”59 Again finding his inspiration in de Tocqueville, Levin asserts that in a society with abundant, inexpensive land, relative social

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equality, and abundant opportunities for upward social mobility, wealth early became the prime criterion of social place in the United States. The act of defining social place and identity by wealth has created a “passion for possession” and “deep commitment to private property” that goes far deeper than a mere desire for the good things of this world. However, one can never hope for genuine personal security in one’s identity; capitalist economies are inherently unstable, which translates to an abiding sense of anxiety for those whose sense of self is rooted in property. Levin believes that the logic of this situation has profound negative implications for any advocates of radical change, for “when possessions are the meaning of one’s being, the antiradical impulse is powerful and easily mobilized.”60 Radicalism does not merely pose a threat to one’s ownership of things but threatens “the nation’s definition of its entire purpose for being, and to the individual citizens’ definition of the meaning and worth of his life. . . . This is, in part, why America transforms mere radical rhetoric into apocalyptic dispossession.”61 This “threat to existential identity” mobilizes those who feel threatened by “mythic radical conspiracies.”62

The Structure of the Irrational: Polarities Conceptual polarities are a prominent theme in all four of these books, and although they appear in various forms, there is no doubt that the basic poles are good and evil. This is a natural view for pluralists like Lipset and Raab, one of whose major objections to non-pluralistic politics is precisely the fact that it drags morality into an area in which it has no business and in which it becomes (in their view) a dangerous force. However, even those who attack pluralism, like Levin, must come to grips with the fact that it is this absolutist moralism that allows the political right to consign its opponents to the realms of darkness. And, as Lipset and Raab point out: Historical moralism is revealed as the critical link to historical simplism. Historical moralism is defined, in this context, as the tendency to believe that human events are totally shaped by the supremacy of good intentions over bad at any given moment, or vice versa.63 This sheds further light on the political right’s penchant for conspiracy theory, for “if historical movement at every stage is almost exclusively a matter of good will or ill will, freely chosen, those who make a mistake are not just wrong; they are evil. And all our social political pathologies are the result of deliberate evil-doing.”64 Tracing the consequences of this kind of thinking, Kovel further elaborates: The morality of anticommunism drives toward a state of all-goodness defining our side of things, surrounded, indeed defined, by a force of

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Conclusion all-badness: absolute evil, evil so great that anything—any violation of human rights, any crime, any war—is a priori justified. The motto “better dead than red” expressed the phenomenon at its simplest.65

Communism is the pole identified with evil, then, and America or Americanism the pole identified with good. These polar extremes are matters of some interest; Kovel makes extensive use of an image that is descriptive yet perhaps misleading, calling anticommunism a “black hole.” A black hole, Kovel claims, occurs when contradictions “tear a being apart,” leading to an abyss of spiritual emptiness.66 The black hole is “that zone of moral density where all distinctions run together,” causing communism “to become tarred with the brush of every kind of diabolized otherness harbored by the human mind.”67 It has an overriding quality that is “outside ordinary experience” and “fits into the spiritual dimension of things,” having “spiritual pretensions, albeit of the demonizing kind.”68 The very extremism of this vision causes anticommunism to radiate a “mythic atmosphere,” and, indeed, anticommunism operates in “a mythic universe that has obliterated history by presenting it as an eternal struggle between American goodness and Communist badness.”69 Reasoned distinctions disappear, and “diabolism becomes the only language capable of representing history. . . . Where the black hole operates, Communism can never be bad enough. Communism must be all bad, drawn to hell in toto.”70 The basic opposition, then, is between good and evil. However, there are ancillary polarities, and these include: Christianity vs. communism (Lipset and Raab), preservatism (associated with the political right) vs. innovation (identified with the left), individual/individualism vs. the state/collectivism (Lipset and Raab and Levin), conformity vs. nonconformity (Levin), dependence vs. independence (which Levin identifies as “an apparent individuality which is actually a conformity, a conformity which appears to be a sum of individualities”),71 and, finally, self and other (Kovel). This last—self and other—is identified only—and then indirectly—by Kovel, who notes the otherness both of the communist as a person (a kind of ultimate stranger, an outsider, an “Un-American”) and of communism as a way of life (discussing the House Un-American Activities Committee, Kovel points out that “other nations never were able to define Communism as somehow ‘un-’ the identity of that nation. There was no Committee on ‘Un-Chinese Activities’ in China or ‘Un-French Activities’ in France despite powerful Communist movements, movements that in each case suffered heavy repression”).72 Lipset and Raab further posit an opposition between pluralistic societies “in which there are differentiated and fluid standards” and monistic societies “in which there are uniform and fixed standards.”73 Pluralism is put forward as the intellectual equivalent of capitalism; embracing “both diversity and change,” pluralism operates on the basis of procedures whose “conceptual heart” is “the open market place of ideas.” Monism, on the other hand, is marked by generic and historical simplism. In other

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words, “[t]he ascription of simple and single causes to complex human events evokes the image of every historical moment as virginal,” while the “relatedness of events and conditions to each other is dimmed.”74 Lipset and Raab deny that monism is necessarily identified with a polar extreme but do admit that “[b]eing on the tip of any axis means, by definition, being separated from the normative center of power and ideology and would raise the risk of frustration which presumably is conducive to the monistic impulse.” With regard to the statism-individualism axis, they argue that there is a necessary element of contradiction and ambiguity, of unresolved tension, that is appropriate to this polarity. The resolution of this tension brings a “greater risk that the monistic complex will set in. Or conversely, the monistic impulse will increase the probability of movement toward the ideological poles.”75 If, then, these psychic polarities exist in our consciousnesses as possible states, then freedom and power represent hopes, while imprisonment and impotence represent fears that haunt and put pressure on every relationship, political and social, into which we enter. The core dilemma of human social existence is that we are simultaneously selfish and social beings, and the “other” is always a threat or a promise or both. Our effort to structure our individual and collective lives in the face of an ultimately irresoluble tension between the poles of self and other is the dynamo that powers all social life and permeates all political and social thought; therefore, it deserves a central position in any exposition of social thought. I am suggesting that political ideologies center on the postulation of one absolute or another as real and therefore the foundation of the rest of existence, in other words, that political ideologies are based on ontological propositions. For example, classical liberalism and modern conservatism explicitly rest on the proposition that only the individual is real. As John Dewey described it: The individual of earlier liberalism was a Newtonian atom having only external time and space relations to other individuals, save in that each social atom was equipped with inherent freedom. These ideas . . . formed part of a philosophy . . . in which the particular ideas of individuality and freedom were asserted to be absolute and eternal truths; good for all times and all places.76 In other words, classical liberals (and modern conservatives) believe that the individual has ultimate reality, is, in effect, absolute, being that against which all else must be measured. On the other hand, the defining characteristic of fascism is its view of the nation as absolute. Benito Mussolini’s 1932 entry on fascism in the Italian Encyclopedia (written with the assistance of Giovanni Gentile) is explicit, saying that [t]he foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only

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Conclusion to be conceived of in their relation to the State. . . . The Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality—and thus it may be called the “ethic” State. . . . The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone.77

Further on Mussolini makes it clear that the state and the nation are one and the same thing, different only in that it is the fact of having a state that allows a people to be a nation; that being accomplished, however, the nation and the state are coterminous and to all intents and purposes one and the same thing. The point for the present purpose is not whether Mussolini actually believed what he said or not; the point is that the real existence of the state and the relative existence of the individual are the basis for his claim to organize society and the basis for the suppression of the rights of individuals. Freeden will have a list of attributes that includes leadership, totalitarian organicism, myth, regenerative revolution, and violence as core concepts alongside nationalism in his morphological analysis, but all these qualities can logically be derived from nationalism itself if the nation is taken as an absolute. For example, if the nation has the attribute of absolute existence—which already accounts for “totalitarian organicism”—then it must be indivisible, or else the component parts would be arguably more real than the whole, the nation; hence the fascist hatred for parliamentary democracy, which is predicated on the existence of division and disagreement within the nation. Thus, if the nation is to be indivisible in the crude sense of not having component parts, then its will, as Mussolini suggests, must be indivisible; the only way for that to be possible is if that will is concentrated in one person, and so we arrive at the leadership principle. Fascist ideology is committed to violence not as some adjacent quality but because the logic of the nation as absolute means that it must not and cannot be influenced by external forces; therefore, the only possible relationships to that which is external are antagonism or absorption, ingestion, so to speak—either way, external entities must be destroyed to annihilate the contradiction posed by their mere existence. Fascists, like radical individualists, are blissfully unaware of the aphorism that “you are what you eat.” Finally, the mythological element is necessary to bypass logic in establishing the actual existence of something that is manifestly logically absurd, i.e., the postulate that a nation—an aggregate of human beings in a form that is demonstrably historical and conditional in its origins and formation—has the ontological status of being absolute. All of these qualities, then, do not exist side by side with the idea of the nation, but rather flow from it. It is this assertion of the reality of the nation that makes Nazism genuinely a form of fascism and not simply a phenomenon sui generis; the

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fundamental difference between the Italian and German variants was the fact that while Mussolini claimed that the state defined the nation, Hitler marked race as the defining factor; in both cases, however, the absolute status of the nation and the merely relative claims of all else act as the defining essence that justifies all action. It is also this ideological insistence on the real existence of the nation and its absolute priority over all individuals or social institutions that differentiates genuine fascist dictatorships from garden variety, fundamentally non-fascist dictatorships such as Rafael Trujillo’s in the Dominican Republic (1930–1961). Whatever one postulates as the real, everything else—as Mussolini/ Giovanni Gentile affirm in the preceding text—has a merely relative existence. So political ideologies propose different systems of organizing society around what is considered to be real; in each ideology, the real takes the central place, with all else being peripheral. What of modern American conservatism, then, which combines radical individualism, nationalism, and (though not always) a particular type of, or take on, Christianity? If we try to make a structure in which all these elements are linked, we come up with the kind of incoherent formulation we earlier saw expressed by Calvin Coolidge in his discussion of patriotism. However, if we regard these elements as three separate, mutually exclusive ideologies, three worldviews that are held by people who call themselves “conservatives” and that are invoked, each in their turn and without any intrinsic logical connection each to the other, according to the immediate justificatory needs of the moment, then we relieve ourselves of the necessity to make sense of nonsense. As cognitive linguist George Lakoff points out, “[f]ar from” all citizens “have coherent ideologies.” Rather, “[i]t is normal for people to operate with multiple models in various domains.”78 Very few, if any, people are fully logical and consistent, and those who attempt to be are very often the fanatics of the world. There is no intrinsic reason— other than that it makes no logical sense—that we should each of us contain more than one worldview, using them, like bifocal or trifocal glasses, according to our need to justify whatever we wish to justify at a given moment. To regard the elements of radical individualism, nationalism, and Christianity as “ineliminable features” as Freeden does is to remove them from the context of the logical structure in which they exist and which gives them their power, i.e., the emotional power that gets real people to take real actions with real effects on themselves and other people. Freeden’s scheme, by concentrating on reconciling the irreconcilable, also robs us of the ability to see that these logical structures have their own tendencies that project into time and that the internal logics of each of conservatism’s three component ideologies are bound to run into each other in mutually contradictory ways. For example, the logic of the market says that one need only consider profits, while the logic of nationalism says that one must consider Americans. To make profits, one must keep costs as low as possible; therefore, if people will and can

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work more cheaply in Latin America or China, then we should do our manufacturing there. However, that means that American citizens lose jobs or must accept lower paying jobs and a declining standard of living. The choice is stark: do we choose in favor of ourselves or of patriotism, i.e., jobs for Americans? Another well-known thinker about political ideologies whose work can help us shed further light on the political problems that flow from avoiding metaphysical assertions is George Lakoff. His book Moral Politics builds on his work as a cognitive linguist. Lakoff starts from the assumption that the human mind is by nature “embodied,” meaning first and foremost that “[a]ny reasoning you do using a concept requires that the neural structures of the brain carry out that reasoning.” Therefore “the architecture of your brain’s neural networks determines what concepts you have and hence the kind of reasoning you can do.”79 Lakoff and Johnson argue that living beings must categorize in order to survive (dangerous/safe, inedible/edible, and the like) but that all our categories derive from our experience of our bodies in relation to other bodies, i.e., physical reality. Our basic “sensorimotor” experiences comprise the collection of references we have to allow us to interpret and understand our world; this means that whenever we want to understand something, we must refer to that domain of experience and our interpretation is, perforce, metaphorical. So, for example, an intimate relationship is conceived in terms of the primal experience of space as “close.” Hence, the laws of thought are metaphorical, not logical, and truth is a metaphorical construction rather than an attribute of some “objective reality.” Here, then, he draws away from any idea of ontological realities, the “real” existence of things. With the metaphor as his fundamental analytical tool, then, Lakoff goes to work to analyze American politics. He proposes that the “nation as family” is the central metaphor shared by all Americans and that within that national family the government fills the role of parent, with the citizens occupying the role of children.80 The dividing line between conservative and liberal, then, is the answer to the question, what kind of parent is best? Lakoff argues that conservatives adhere to a “strict father” model, which assumes that the world is a dangerous place and that children are born bad and must be made to be good through punishment for misbehavior. The strict father teaches right behavior through discipline that is internalized, creating good children who become good adults, able to fend for themselves. The conservative state, according to this view, reproduces this vision of the conservative family: citizens are to be treated fairly but not coddled; they are responsible for their own fortunes, their own success or failure. Misbehavior must be severely punished, and such punishment is viewed as an effective way of teaching citizens what is acceptable and what is not.81 Liberals, on the other hand, subscribe to the “nurturant parent” model, one that assumes that children “become responsible, self-disciplined, and

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self-reliant through being cared for and respected, and through caring for others” and that the “obedience of children comes out of their love and respect for their parents, not out of the fear of punishment.” The nurturant parent, then, sees “open, two-way, mutually respectful communication” to be crucial. The liberal political ideal is, Lakoff holds, consonant with this model of family relationship, envisioning a society in which all citizens are cherished, with help extended to them in case of need.82 The problems with this analysis are manifold: to begin with, postwar conservatives have a tendency to define powerful government as the central social/political problem, which means that they are very naughty children indeed because, after all, in the strictest of patriarchal families, families like those of the ancient Romans, the paterfamilias was very, very powerful, not weak and small. Moreover, the choice of family as the central metaphor seems to be a choice, not a scientific finding: yes, Lakoff adduces some common metaphors such as “father of his country” or “Uncle Sam” and others, but these are hardly dispositive. What of the conservative’s tendency to liken government to business and to reason that the businessperson, the individual who has practical experience running a business, is the best qualified to run a country? Perhaps the business metaphor is another version of the family. In the family model, even if the father is harsh, it is (theoretically) for the child’s own good. However, a business runs on the principle that if we need you, we hire you at the lowest possible rate, and if we don’t need you, we fire you. Your welfare has nothing to do with the matter; it’s just business. Lakoff probably would not be deterred by his model’s lack of relationship to time and place, but a historian must be. Alexis de Tocqueville described American fathers as being far less authoritarian than Europeans, and yet American society was and is less “coddling” or “nurturing” (word choice according to one’s political preferences) of its citizens than European society from Bismarckian Germany through to the present. Finally, and most important for present purposes, is this: Lakoff never defines what he means by the word “family.” He probably believes that he does not need to since, according to his thinking, “family” is derived from our concrete experience and not from definition. However, “family” is and must be something with boundaries, that is, an inside and an outside, and is, in fact, defined by those boundaries. Lakoff seems to assume that everyone who has American citizenship is accepted as a member of the American family, but the exceptions to that are too numerous and blatant to arouse anything other than astonishment at his failure to recognize them. The critical question—never considered by Lakoff at all—is one we’ve been looking at all along: who is family and who is not? Who is of us (inside) and who is “other” (outside)? Who is “American” and who is “un-American”? And on what basis do we define them as such? Since so much of conservative politics has been built on these distinctions, any theory that ignores them seems to be of very limited explanatory value.

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And so, we come back to some basic, seemingly inescapable antinomies: is/is not, same/different. I have taken great pains to establish the notion that ideologies are predicated on assertions of ontological reality because this is politically important. Anyone talking to people about what they should do and how they should organize their societies needs a starting point, either explicit or implicit, and that starting point is generally what people will accept as real. Again, this is because what people take as real is what matters to them and what matters to them will precipitate action. Whether people will heed another person or not will, first of all, depend on whether and to what extent speaker and listener share—or believe they share—a view of reality. So, for example, the market individualist believes wholeheartedly that amassing and keeping resources represents the fulfillment of one’s individuality and is profoundly satisfying; the object, as Thorstein Veblen argued long ago, is to amass more and more, more than one could possibly use in a lifetime. On the other hand, among American Indians a successful Ottawa trader, as described by historian Gregory Dowd, “amassed no fortune and sought no propertied independence; instead, he carefully gave away his goods to acquire both socially indebted followers and personal prestige.”83 So, if one speaks to others on the basis of a different assumption about what is real, then one’s words will go right past them or will seem foolish or contemptible or, worse, strike them as a threat to their reality. On the other hand, as Lakoff correctly notes, most people, not being systematic thinkers, easily and unthinkingly accommodate multiple and contradictory worldviews based on mutually contradictory ontological assertions. Now, the one political opinion group that has consciously and scrupulously sought to keep its distance from metaphysical assertions is modern liberals. As we have seen, what liberals embrace is not a metaphysical proposition regarding an absolute that then determines what is good and what is evil, but rather they espouse a means, a method—the scientific method—which itself represents an ongoing project of inquiry and a road to such truth as might be available to human apprehension. This means that the end is supposedly perpetually open as the means reveal ever-new information, knowledge, and possibilities. This was vividly illustrated in the thinking of Paul Wilson Sullivan, the student whose worldview was the subject of the last chapter; there we saw the logical connections that combined pragmatism, philosophical and moral relativism, and secular humanism into a more or less cohesive approach to understanding and dealing with the problems of human society. We saw the great emphasis Sullivan put on relativism as the inevitable correlation to a reasonable approach to understanding social life: due to different conditions of life, different societies have different needs and therefore will have different values, all legitimate insofar as they serve the needs of that society. While not all postwar liberals were explicitly relativists,

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they nearly all—whether relativists, logical positivists, existentialists, or adherents of analytic philosophy or people who avoided the question of the foundation of values altogether—shied away from the postulation of those absolutes upon which a solid ethical formulation and vision could have been built. As Robert Booth Fowler, writing about the philosophical underpinnings of postwar liberalism, points out, the “intellectual response that relativism, ‘good reason,’ and arguments from ‘logic’ represented was diverse, agreeing only in firmly rejecting an approach that appeared to sustain ideology.”84 In addition, as he also points out, pragmatism— “what works”—seemed to offer a common sense way to sidestep all such vexatious issues altogether, should one choose to do so.85 Liberals’ political opponents, however, dealt in no such uncertainties and were able to address their audiences with considerably more positivity if considerably less nuance; it has never been clear, however, that nuance—however intellectually desirable it may be—has ever been a political asset. The liberal, however, hoisted his or her banner on the mast of the scientific method, trusting good logic and good evidence to act as compass and sextant. As Paul Wilson Sullivan wrote: I accept Dr. Dewey’s suggestion that the liberal function today is to preserve the best of the old in harmony with the needs of the new. It is to “mediate social transitions,” avoiding both the paralysis of reaction and the blindness of nihilism. It is to take a middle road, rejecting the tyranny of the left and the tyranny of the right. It is to escape the restrictions of a closed and inflexible dogmatism, denying that in any area of life it can be a single infallible set of answers, or situation that is entirely black and white. If time has taught us anything, it has shown that progress and stability occur only as we subject our institutions and beliefs to continuing process of criticism and adjustment in response to society’s needs and aspirations. This criticism and this adjustment are the heart of the liberal functions, now as before. Only in this balance of what we are and what we want to be can freedom be further extended into more lives.86 Scientific inquiry itself has always been bifurcated between two impulses, the search for knowledge for knowledge’s sake and the Baconian strain that urged that human reason applied to the natural world could produce progress, i.e., better lives for human beings. Since liberalism constitutes a political ideology, it must, of necessity, be committed to the second of these two uses of the scientific method, to producing better lives for human beings—and there’s the rub. If we propose to produce better lives for human beings, do we mean all human beings, the majority of human beings, as many human beings as possible, or what? The reason there’s a problem here is that a defining feature of liberalism has always been

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the high priority that it has given to the individual, however defined. This means that liberalism, to fulfill its goal, that is, the benefit of as many human beings as possible, has to bridge two terms, the individual and “as many human beings as possible.” Adam Smith conceived he had done this when he posited the notion that within market relations, the individual can safely pursue his or her self-interest without concern for others because the market mechanism of competition would place an external cap on one’s ability to monopolize material resources and hence one’s ability to oppress one’s fellows through the accretion of wealth and the control of resources that brings with it. Almost immediately a sort of definition was supplied for what we have called “as many human beings as possible” by Jeremy Bentham, whose utility principle called for the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The market seemed the perfect social tool—no matter how unsocial its underlying premises—for bringing this desirable state of affairs into being, and laissez-faire combined with Samuel Smiles’s immensely popular Self Help—which took as its watchwords the aphorism that “Heaven helps those who help themselves” and Disraeli’s dictum that “We put too much faith in systems, and look too little to men”—became the ruling ethos of the rising middle class. However, as time went by, some businesspeople found it to be in their own interest to maintain the market laws of supply and demand but to challenge the third cardinal law of the market—competition—in the name of “rationality,” and by the late 1800s we find two of America’s most prominent capitalists, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, forthrightly preaching the evils of competition. Now, it might be argued that rationality is in the eye of the beholder; be that as it may, with the reduction of competition to, at best, a conditional status, there was no longer any theoretical mechanism to reconcile self-interest and the interests of “as many human beings as possible.” A new strain of thought emerged, urging state intervention to offset the negative effects of unconstrained self-interest; the New Liberalism of T. H. Green, L. T. Hobhouse, and John A. Hobson drew its emotional inspiration from the empirical work of Mearns, Booth, and Rowntree87 and much of its intellectual inspiration from Bentham’s follower, John Stuart Mill.88 Added to this, for Americans at least, was a complementary line of thought, pragmatism, which suggested in William James’s familiar formulation that [p]ragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and

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adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.89 Pragmatism has gone through a few twists and turns since James’s time, but this basic reasoning, with its abhorrence of the metaphysical, remained intact at its core at least through the 1950s. Most prominent in connecting the pragmatic idea with modern liberalism was philosopher John Dewey. As Morris Dickstein writes: In Dewey’s hands especially, [pragmatism] reflected an evolutionary perspective that showed the influence of both Hegelian historicism and Darwinian naturalism. Darwin’s work undercut not only traditional religious belief but also the sense of an unchanging, essential nature. As Hegel (and Marx) fostered a dynamic view of history, Darwin legitimized a genetic approach to animal and human behavior. Social Darwinists took this as a justification of the harsh struggle for life under unregulated capitalism, but for progressive thinkers it meant that the sources of social inequality, far from being a given, could be traced empirically and altered by changes in education and public policy. In Dewey’s work as an active reformer and prolific theorist, pragmatism became part of the surge of liberalism, progressivism, and social reform in the first decades of the twentieth century.90 In the hands of Dewey it became an integral part of the intellectual background of that tendency that takes shape first as progressivism and then as New Deal liberalism, filtering, as we have seen, into the thinking of Paul Wilson Sullivan detailed in the last chapter. To the pragmatic tradition’s casting off of metaphysical moorings was added another structurally connected theme that we find figuring prominently in Sullivan’s articles, i.e., value relativism. For, if we let go of the notion of the absolute, there is, of course, no final measure of value. Dewey explicitly espoused what he called “historical relativism,” criticizing earlier liberals and what he dubbed the “pseudo-liberals” of the Liberty League and its ilk for lacking it, for sacrificing the “generous ideas and aspirations” that lay at the heart of the liberal endeavor in their determination to maintain the outmoded views of atomistic individualism. As Dewey put it, Even when words remain the same, they mean something very different when they are uttered by a minority struggling against repressive measures, and when expressed by a group that has attained power and then uses ideas that were once weapons of emancipation as instruments for keeping the power and wealth they have obtained.

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The zeitgeist served to enhance the power of these themes: first Einstein’s formidable unhinging of the universe from the relatively stable Newtonian model and then, as Robert Booth Fowler points out, the contributions of anthropology through the work of widely known and widely read scholars like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead contributed to an ethos that acknowledged that what was sauce for the goose might not always be sauce for the gander.92 Philosophically, among many intellectuals, and perhaps even more among those who aspired to be considered intellectuals, existentialism was the vogue, while personally increasing numbers of Americans were starting to turn to psychoanalysis—a therapy whose goal was not to conform to some absolute standard, religious or ethical, but rather to find psychological health, in Freud’s words, “to make the unconscious conscious.” In a sense we see a movement from Alexander Pope’s Enlightenment dictum that “man is the measurement of man” to “the self is the measurement of the self.” The evolving political theories of the time, most notably pluralism, also were accommodating to an ethic of broad tolerance of cultural and ethical diversity. The liberals’ abhorrence of absolutes—and therefore of political ideologies—was enhanced by the rise of the great totalitarian movements of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, with their attendant personal and social devastation. The free person, in an age of existentialist uncertainty, becomes a sort of heroic figure, a kind of intellectual Lone Ranger who does not seek the comfort of metaphysical absolutes since “[a]gainst totalitarian certitude, free society can only offer modern man devoured by alienation and fallibility.”93 The liberal intellectuals of the 1950s embraced pluralism because, like the scientific method that lay at the core of liberal thought and commitment, it represented what seemed to them an open-ended process.94 Schlesinger wrote that “[i]f our government and our society are to work, they must rest, not on the presumed superior wisdom and infallibility of a single-interest, but on the diverse and reciprocally conditioned judgments of a plurality of interests, for this alone can faithfully represent the brilliant and wonderful variety that is America.”95 And to Daniel Bell, Richard Pels points out, the old class distinctions had become irrelevant since America was neither a class nor a mass society. On the one hand . . . the power of decision making in the modern corporation had passed from long-established families whose wealth and property were largely inherited, to a new generation of managers whose authority

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derived from their technical skills and professional competence. This transformation of American capitalism meant that one’s access to the boardroom depended not on lineage but on education, ambition, and efficient performance—qualifications potentially available to anybody. Nor could a successful manager transfer his expertise to his heirs; positions were open to all according to ability. Thus in Bell’s judgment, America had no “ruling class” in the Marxist or aristocratic sense.96 It is curious and seems worthy of note that postwar liberals had transferred their allegiance from the faith of early liberals in the market as a mechanically perfect self-regulating social tool for creating the best results for everyone—a faith no longer sustainable for many in the wake of the Great Depression—to a political process that they presumed—on the basis of extraordinarily little evidence—to embody an equally perfect selfregulating mechanical process that would also result in the best of all possible worlds. So instead of competitive markets without referees, there would be a competitive political system, with a government, elected through an explicitly non-neutral process, that would somehow end up acting as a neutral referee, and this political system was somehow to prove immune to the effects of the concentration of wealth that had skewed results in the market. People like Schlesinger, Niebuhr, Bell, Oscar Handlin, Seymour Lipset, and others renounced the hope for a world free from conflict and—like James Madison—embraced controlled conflict as the essence of freedom itself. The contestants were to be voluntary associations, which “became in the minds of these intellectuals the social analogue to the two-party system and the mixed economy.”97 The agent of control was to be the modern state whose function would be “to define the ground rules of the game.” As Schlesinger conceived it, “Keynes, not Marx, is the prophet of the new radicalism.”98 And Schlesinger’s “radicalism” is a very tepid brew indeed, given the bold sound and history of the term “radical.” Essentially, Schlesinger, like many of the other postwar liberals, is a pluralist who embraces the vision of plural, self-balancing interest groups that Madison expressed in “Federalist 10” into the 20th century, the chief difference being that while Madison depended on the sheer size of the country to prevent any fish from becoming too big for the pond, Schlesinger, in an age of enhanced communications and corporate power, relies on government to step in, as he puts it, “not to pitch, catch, hit homers or (just as likely) pop up or throw to the wrong base,” but rather decorously to “define the rules of the game.”99 And Keynesian policies would allow economic growth to act as the rising tide that would raise all ships, a magic bullet that by creating an ever-growing national pie would satisfy the needs of capital, of labor, of national defense, of the poor, without any need for unpleasant class conflicts; even if modest redistributive economic policies were to be enacted, capital would be satisfied because its piece of pie would still be growing larger.100

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The New Liberalism, then, stressed not the redistribution of power and resources but rather the maintenance of a full-employment economy with the enhancement of mass consumption as the means of achieving continuous economic growth and an ever-higher national standard of living. Full employment could be ensured, according to economist Alvin Hansen, by “maintaining a national minimum of social services, by undertaking an improvement and development program of public works, regional resource development, urban redevelopment and public housing, and by underwriting and making loans to private business and foreign countries.” Not only would these programs benefit specific interests; more importantly, they would keep the national economy humming.101 Liberal politicians and intellectuals were not the only ones brought round to this approach; many labor leaders were also willing to follow the Keynesian star. In the postwar era, organized labor had established itself as a political force that few Northern urban Democrats could afford to ignore; Nelson Lichtenstein writes, “the union movement defined the left wing of what was possible in the political affairs of the day. Its vision and its power attracted a species of political animal hardly existent today, the ‘labor-liberal’ who saw organized labor as absolutely central to the successful pursuit of his political agenda.”102 Lichtenstein and Brinkley concur in judging that “just as liberalism increasingly came to define itself as largely concerned with the maintenance of economic growth and an expansion of the welfare state, so too would the UAW and the rest of the labor movement define its mission in these terms.”103 As Brinkley points out, liberal hopes for the postwar economy found their most detailed expression in the National Resource Planning Board’s 1943 report, Security, Work, and Relief Policies. This document called for a full-employment economy in which the federal government would bear the responsibility for creating jobs for those who could work but were unable to find employment in the private sector. It also proposed a generous safety net that would fulfill two functions: it would provide income maintenance for those who for some reason were unable to help themselves, and it would help increase consumption by putting spending power in the hands of people who were guaranteed to put their money into circulation quickly. Truman and Eisenhower—though a Republican—understood and accepted the recently developed role of the president as the “manager of prosperity” (a distinctly Keynesian development), and in Eisenhower we find a president at work trying to find the tools to reconcile traditional conservative aims (budget balancing, control of inflation, prevention of the redistribution of wealth) with the new imperatives and tools imposed on the office by the ordeal of the Depression (most importantly maintaining an “acceptable” level of unemployment). Since fiscal Keynesianism implied liberal results, we find conservatives, in an effort to combat this tendency, developing one of their rare creative contributions to economic

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practice, a monetarist tactic to infuse purchasing power into the economy during recessionary periods. While John W. Sloan’s Eisenhower and the Management of Prosperity portrays a prudent and frugal Eisenhower who wanted to keep military spending down, seeing the military as an essentially unproductive necessary evil,104 in The Business Response to Keynes Robert M. Collins brings out an important point to explain why 1950s Republicans were more willing to tolerate increases in military expenditures than in social welfare measures: money spent on the military is at least socially neutral if not actually beneficial to the status quo, while social welfare spending redistributes income, creates new institutions, and shifts demand from one industry to another. Collins sees Keynesianism in the 1950s as a school of thought co-opted by conservative people for conservative ends: he writes, “The adoption of Keynesian concepts did result in an enlargement of the government’s responsibility for economic affairs. But on balance, these ideas did not conquer power; they were, instead, absorbed and molded to fit the needs of the business system.”105 Along with the shift to Keynesianism as the painless alternative to the redistribution of wealth, the second chief effect of World War II on liberals—a strengthened commitment to racial justice—arose from two sources. The brutally racist character of the Nazi regime cast a new light on homegrown American racism. Gerstle points out that the Nazi challenge brought two fundamental liberal convictions into question: (1) that “fixing capitalism” was the most important problem facing modern societies, and (2) that racial and ethnic discrimination could be remedied indirectly through economic reform. In addition, the strong, centralized composition of the fascist states made liberals realize that centralized state power was a neutral force that could function just as easily on behalf of reaction as it could on behalf of social justice. This, combined with a series of powerful pushes from an African-American community no longer willing to tolerate second class citizenship, helped give rise to a “new centrality of the notion of liberty and ‘rights’ among white liberals as they sought to identify what best differentiated their society and its political ideas from the totalitarian regimes the United States was fighting.”106 Gerstle identifies another new trend arising from the war: liberals— always committed to rationality as a value—had formerly tended to regard class issues as preeminently suited to rational reform, whereas ethnic and racial problems were avoided as murky areas of emotionality not easily accessible to rational solutions. However, the seemingly irrational mass politics embodied in Hitler’s rallies in Germany, Mussolini’s brutal blackshirts, or even Huey Long’s popular dictatorship over Louisiana in the US put class issues in a new light. The emergence of McCarthyism led postwar liberal public intellectuals to reinterpret American politics according to a pluralist template; McCarthyism became classed with populism as movements that “mobilized feelings of uneasiness over a sophisticated,

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cosmopolitan, urban, industrial society,” radical in “rejection of industrial society” as well as “suspicion of reasonable political leadership.”107 The massive migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North during the war was also instrumental in bringing race closer to the forefront of the liberal agenda. In his article “World War II and American Liberalism” Alan Brinkley points out that “in the 1940s alone, 2 million African Americans left the South, and 3 million more moved in the twenty years after that.”108 With many more black Americans working in factories, belonging to unions, growing more militant in pursuit of their own rights, and, most importantly, being able for the first time to vote, the pressure on politicians to satisfy the demands of this constituency rose tremendously. Nothing succeeds like success; the renewed prosperity that resulted from the massive government programs of World War II gave Keynesian economics a luster in the eyes of liberals that would not dim for decades to come. With the New Deal stalled, the renewed prospects for progress opened up by the wartime success of Keynesian economics revived the hopes of liberals who had glumly watched the social welfare programs beaten back blow by blow over the previous years; here was a way of achieving at least a portion of their program that did not entail striving to change the basics of a system that had proven to be far from malleable. So, liberals had found in what Kennedy’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Walter Heller, called “Keynes-cum-growth”109 a seemingly non-controversial, seemingly nonideological way of making everyone happy, a way of adding to wealth of both the have-mores and the have-lesses without taking anything away from anybody. However, by turning their backs on the positive assertions embodied in an ideology and by failing to take an ontological position, liberals had politically shot themselves in the foot. In a 2011 New York Times article economist Paul Krugman gave a concise picture of the ideological divide in American politics, writing: One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state—a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net—morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate. The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft.110 If we look back, we can find John F. Kennedy—surely no sentimentalist— defining a liberal this way: “someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their

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schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties.”111 Here we find issues galore: racial inequality and all the attendant issues of political rights, social rights, etc. that went with it, poverty and all of its attendant issues—and we find an invocation of “caring,” but liberals had developed no rationale to tell any white person why they should care about any black person or any rich or moderately comfortable person why they should care about any poor person. Enlightened self-interest? Where’s the self-interest? What’s in it for me? Fairness? What is fair must be based on some set of ethical guidelines—where are the ethical guidelines in a mode of thought that is predicated on “what works”? And again, we face the question, what works for whom? His system of management worked well enough for Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in America. In 1890, after the steel unions had been broken in the Homestead lockout/strike, Carnegie’s workers labored 12 hours a day 364 days a year, and Carnegie paid them about $10 a week, just above the poverty line of $500 a year. It took the wages of nearly 4,000 of his workers to match the earnings of Carnegie himself. Whether or not this worked well enough for the workers is, at the very least, an open question. Yet in the most famous liberal work of the 1950s, The Vital Center, 1950s public liberal par excellence Arthur Schlesinger shows only scorn for the sentimental “doughfaces” who questioned the justice and the price of Carnegie’s achievement; true to the pragmatic dictum that “what works” is what is justified, Schlesinger becomes virtually a liberal Lenin in his adherence to the notion that the means justify the end. When he does look at the price paid, the human suffering is barely in sight—America paid only in “political and moral decadence, in the wasteful use of economic resources, in the centralization of economic power.” Then a slight nod: “the price we paid, though perhaps exorbitant, was infinitely less in human terms than the price by the people of Russia.” Apparently we need to develop a Bentham-like scientific quantification of suffering—and perhaps of who suffers (as long as it’s not me)—to judge “what works.”112 Moreover, the pragmatist in Schlesinger leads him to assess these two figures, the communist tyrant and robber baron, in terms of results without regard for motivation—yet surely what distinguishes a Carnegie or a Rockefeller most from a Stalin is not the fact that they caused fewer deaths; that reduces the comparison to the equivalent of comparing the man who murdered five people to the one who murdered a hundred and concluding that the man who murdered a hundred was 20 times worse. The pragmatist—focused exclusively on results—cannot see that the critical distinction—what makes Stalin monstrous—is that he intended to harm, intended to kill large numbers of human beings, while any harm that Andrew Carnegie did and any death or injury that he caused were an ancillary effect of the single-minded pursuit of success, status, profits, power, and whatever else motivated him in his career accompanied by a concomitant disregard of human suffering. The pragmatist might say that the net effect for the person who dies is

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the same in either case and that therefore the distinction of intention is irrelevant; however, that has the unfortunate effect of returning Carnegie to an equivalency with Stalin—just a smaller scale killer with better results for us; so we are willing to pay the price of someone else’s life along with the resulting devastation to someone else’s family, loved ones, and friends so that we can benefit. We can see here that perhaps the thinking of the student Paul Wilson Sullivan is more sophisticated than that of his famous liberal elder, Schlesinger. Sullivan perceives that the core belief that impelled and allowed a Lenin or a Stalin to create mayhem in the name of humanity is the belief that the end justifies the means. Sullivan rejects this, suggesting that means and end are no more separable than an acorn from an oak tree. The pragmatist in Schlesinger says that the result is what counts and what must be judged as good or evil; following this logic, we could go as far as applauding the thrusting of the knife into the chest of the victim on the Aztec pyramid because, after all, the net effect is to keep the universe going—at least so the Aztecs believed, and they appear to have been pragmatic. And the objections of the poor fellow on the receiving end of the knife are pragmatically irrelevant. This is a long way from the fighting, inspiring, and invigorating rhetoric of a Robert La Follette, with his insistence that there was an entity called “the American people” faced by an enemy “other,” the trusts, or a Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, identifying himself and his audience with the Americans of the Revolution, straightforwardly denounced “economic royalists” and welcomed their hatred. The “American people” may be an intellectually questionable construction, but if American politics is a battle rather than a conversation, then a battle is, of necessity, a matter of “us” against “them,” and the “us” requires identification and definition as much as the enemy, “them.” Therefore, the postulation of entities as actually existing (our side/their side) seems to be politically necessary if one wishes to motivate voters. And yet this is precisely what liberals in their intellectual anxiety to avoid metaphysical assertions and their political anxiety to develop a social theory fundamentally free of class conflict refused to do. The earliest theory of capitalism certainly had not envisioned class conflict as part of the economic system: Adam Smith had proposed the self-regulating market with the three laws of supply, demand, and competition as the solution to the problem of smoothing the relationship between the one and the many. However, this had fallen by the wayside as the principle of competition had been pushed aside by those who had the power and the motivation to do so. With the failure of the individualistic, competitive market and the emergence of dominant oligopolies, the liberals’ substitute vision of the pluralist state with its competing interest groups held to the rules by a disinterested referee state faced the same challenge that faced the mythical self-regulating market; that is, it

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offered no reason that self-motivated interest groups should not seek to undermine the rules in their own interest if they could do so, just as selfinterested players in the market system like Rockefeller and Morgan had relentlessly applied themselves to undermining the market’s basic rules when it was in their interest to do so. And politically, this position was highly vulnerable: the worldview of pluralism, with its refusal to take sides, with its insistence on the equal legitimacy of all players, is poorly calculated to motivate or inspire anybody except in the pursuit of their individual or corporate self-interest. Yet programs that liberals embraced even in the early 1950s called for at least a modest degree of self-sacrifice in “the greater interest” without providing a reason for anyone to act in the greater interest if and when that greater interest was counter to their self-interest. The fact that Americans are amenable to making such choices—altruistic choices—is amply demonstrated by the sheer scale of American charitable giving every year. For example, in 2006 about 65% of households with incomes of less than $100,000 gave to charity, with donations from individuals representing about 75% of all US charity.113 This shows a sensitivity to human need that arguably lies at the heart of any liberalism that is not founded on atomistic individualism, but to appeal to this sensibility effectively in the political arena requires a political ideology that offers a rationale and motivation for giving as well as taking/receiving, a rationale less tepid than “the greater interest,” the kind of whole-hearted motivation that comes from nationalism or compassion, especially since McCarthyites were digging in the very fertile mines of fear and hatred. The “hard-nosed” professional liberals of the postwar period were reluctant to indulge in the “softness” that such a rationale involves. Moreover, they did not believe that they needed to since in the pluralist state and with the dizzying prospects of never-ending economic growth the modern era had found a structural solution for social inequities that somehow was supposed to “self-regulate” in the same way that conservatives still believed the market would. Again, with all their embrace of theoretically unbiased technocratic solutions to social relations and problems, liberals found themselves caring about other people, the oppressed, the poor. Still, they had no basis on which to make a political sales pitch—why you should be a liberal too. Their conservative opponents were well-stocked with common sense arguments to tell you why you should be conservative based on their three ideologies of market individualism, nationalism, and Christianity. The selfinterest element of market individualism tells you that you should give up as little of your money as possible and then only for things that will benefit you: the poor are not your problem, and the social and economic disadvantages associated with racial minorities are not your problem. The freedom element of radical individualism tells you that you want a small, weak government because you don’t want Washington running your life and taking money out of your pocket to help people you don’t know and

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don’t care about. Nationalism tells you that you can only trust people like yourself, i.e., people who believe in radical individualism, and that you should be ready to defend that to the death so that even if you can’t enjoy freedom, other “real” Americans, other members of the team, will be able to; and Christianity becomes part of the definition of “American” and therefore part of what defines someone as “one of us.” Moreover, conservatives are able to shift from one paradigm to another with ease, so that the little phrase “Godless communists,” with “atheistic” thrown in occasionally just for good measure, becomes an invocation of radical individualism, nationalism, and Christianity in two words. Liberals are helpless against this Protean form-shifting act because they do not understand the essentialist nature of ideology and therefore have no way to understand and attack the incoherence of their opponents’ positions. To overcome their twofold political dilemma—to justify their worldview and provide a basis for attacking their political opponents—liberals need a positive ideology based on an assertion of the real, an ontology. If, indeed, some kind of ontological assumption underlies every ideology, then what of the liberal heirs of the pragmatic tradition who abhor metaphysical assertions? Are they truly free of all traces of ontological essentialism? Pragmatism was the first relevant strain of thought to explicitly turn away from the metaphysical, and, formulated in the 1870s, it was a relatively late addition to the liberal tradition. At a much earlier date we find one of the great publicists of Enlightenment values, Alexander Pope, describing a proto-liberal ethos that is the polar opposite of Hobbes’s “war of all against all,” expounding a theory of the interconnectedness of entities and an explicit refutation of “atomistic individualism.” In his “Essay on Man” (1732–1744) Pope wrote: Look round our world; behold the chain of love Combining all below and all above. See plastic Nature working to this end, The single atoms each to other tend, Attract, attracted to, the next in place, Form’d and impell’d its neighbour to embrace. See matter next, with various life endued, Press to one centre still, the gen’ral good. Throughout the poem Pope argues vigorously for a view that holds that there is no inherent contradiction between self-love and love of others, or, as he puts it, So two consistent motions act the soul, And one regards itself, and one the Whole. Thus God and Nature link’d the gen’ral frame, And bade Self-love and Social be the same.

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Pope does not negate individualism altogether; he does not deny the existence of self or of self as separate from other, but rather he sees self-love as the gateway to love of other that “serves the virtuous mind to wake.” He writes that God loves from whole to parts: but human soul Must rise from individual to the whole. Therefore, for the human being, love must begin with the self, after which it spreads first to parent, then to friend and neighbor, to country, to all humanity, until it takes “ev’ry creature in of ev’ry kind.” The basis for his thinking is not simply a kindly sentimentality; as an Enlightenment thinker, Pope aspires to be the voice of clear reason, and reason tells him, first, empirically, that people find their happiness in relationship to other people, and second, rationally, that all life is interlinked, that Nothing is foreign; parts relate to whole; One all-extending, all-preserving, soul Connects each being, greatest with the least. Liberalism inescapably is a political system that incorporates love of other along with self-love. This is expressed, not only in liberal programs, but even in a joke that Lyndon Johnson liked to tell. According to Johnson’s biographer, Robert Caro, LBJ used to tell of a Texan who, needing a heart transplant, was given his choice of three hearts: one from a healthy twenty-threeold skiing champion who had just been killed in an avalanche; one from a healthy twenty-year-old football player who had just died of a football injury. “Of course,” the surgeon added, “there’s also this seventy-nine-year-old Republican banker who’s just passed away.” The man thought a moment, and said he would take the banker’s heart. When the surgeon asked why, the man said, “I just wanted to make sure I was getting a heart that had never been used.”114 This may or may not be fair to elderly Republican bankers; however, that is beside the point. What is not beside the point is that, in their anxiety to be seen as hard-nosed, realistic, and tough, the public liberal of the postwar era—accused of conservatives like Westbrook Pegler of being “bleeding hearts”115 and reeling under accusations that he or she was of necessity, as Joseph McCarthy put it, “either a Communist or a cocksucker”116—had eschewed the language of love or anything like it. Disgusted by those “romantic” liberals who had fooled themselves into embracing the Soviet Union with all its brutalities, disenchanted with the “masses” who had supported the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, warned

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by Reinhold Niebuhr that human nature was not, as the Enlightenment thinkers would have it, fundamentally reasonable, men like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., took refuge in realism as an unassailable position, offering no false hopes in human nature that could be disappointed by human ignorance, selfishness, and frailty. In fact, there is no creature for whom Schlesinger expresses quite so much contempt in The Vital Center as the “doughface” progressive whose “sentimental optimism” gives him a “soft and shallow conception of human nature.” This is the “faith of the present-day fellow traveler,” the fool who “believes that man can be reformed by argument,” believes that “the good in man will be liberated by a change in economic institutions.” As we saw in the last chapter, the first part of this description applies to our liberal student, Paul Wilson Sullivan. In The Vital Center Henry Wallace emerges as the supreme example of the doughface dupe, and, as we have already seen, Andrew Carnegie’s and John D. Rockefeller’s sins—once roundly condemned by liberals—are forgiven for their having achieved “industrialization in a single generation.” In Schlesinger’s technocratically realistic mind the suffering of individuals has been subsumed by aggregate numbers, and the “greatest good for the greatest number” has been reduced to a matter of statistical ratios. This passion for “tough-mindedness” is truly ironic since the arch-enemies, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, were notoriously “tough-minded” as well in their pursuit of human welfare, and, judging by the number of people who died at the hands of their regime, they quite succeeded in obliterating all misguided softness and sentimentality from their minds and hearts. Trotsky expressed his contempt for soft-minded socialists like Karl Kautsky fulsomely, writing that though the bourgeoisie was a “falling class” that no longer played an “essential part in production,” still, holding power and threatening to “drag after it into the abyss the whole of society,” the Red Terror was necessary to “tear it off, to chop it away.”117 This is not to condemn Schlesinger as an inhumane man—his expressions of concern about poverty and racism were frequent and surely sincere, and his advocacy of legislation to help those in need was vigorous— and without doubt he had reason to be provoked by fellow travelers: he tells of asking a fellow traveler in the summer of 1939 “what the USSR could possibly do which would make him lose faith. He said, ‘Sign a pact with Hitler.’ But two months later the same fellow traveler had absorbed the Hitler/Stalin pact; and so the hunger to believe, the anxiety and the guilt, continue to triumph over the evidence.” However, it never occurred to Schlesinger that perhaps the error of the “doughfaces” was not their softness, but rather their fascination with the hard-nosed realists of the far left as opposed to the hard-nosed realists of the right. Perhaps the doughfaces were not sufficiently consistent in their softness? Like the hard-nosed Schlesinger they were heroically willing to sacrifice someone else in the cause of human progress.

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However, if there is one major distinction to be drawn between our college liberals and their elders, it is that the youngsters had not yet come to understand the admirable qualities of a hardened heart. Moreover, being young and inexperienced, they still had faith in the universality of the human capacity for reason and in the power of reason to conquer ignorance and, with it, violence, cruelty, selfishness, and want. In short, they were “doughfaces.” Take an opinion piece that appeared on May 22, 1947, in The New Hampshire written by a student named Harold Orel entitled “Where the Liberal Stands.” Awkwardly written, shot through with purple prose, it nonetheless is one of the few positive assertions of what it means to be a liberal to be found in the college press or anywhere else. It is a manifesto of sorts, one that lines Orel up squarely with the line of thought expressed by Pope hundreds of years earlier. It also constitutes the only direct attack on conservatism and conservative values that I have encountered from the period, an attack based, not on the more traditional lines of class conflict and self-interest, but on fundamental human values. Sure, you’ve heard the funny boys. They talk a lot. “A liberal with his two feet planted firmly in the air.” “Too often merely a way of speaking.” “A man willing to spend somebody else’s money.” That’s what they say. They’re mighty tolerant of liberals and want them to stay around, perhaps as balance for the rest of the see-saw; but what is tolerance in their case? The one virtue remaining to people who no longer believe in anything. And the liberal believes. His heart is in the right place. He wants to do something. With the help of the funny boys if possible, without it if necessary, he pitches in and plants a rose or two in the weedovergrown garden of the world. Ever smell the roses in the morning, when dew is heavy, sun is high, and all the world is bright and cool? The roses grow like magic, given the chance. People of the everyday want to give them a chance; but time presses and the emergencies of daily living are against the cultivation of luxuries such as flowers. So from year to year we suffer slums, the pinched faces of children without hope, the standing armies that somehow never seem to sit, the lynched Negroes, the clever lies of the funny boys who stopped being funny years ago, and the unhappiness of the innocents who have no need to die, and do, and never see the flowers grow after all. The innocents never own the roses in the morning; for them there is no morning. War is an ugly word, death of any kind equally as ugly; yet two out of three deaths in the United States are preventable, and forty million lives were lost in this last war throughout the world. Surely war is preventable. Psychology has definitely proven the social attitude is more innate than the war-making will. Must we sacrifice forty million lives on the altar every time two or three generations roll around?

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Conclusion The liberal says the sacrifice is unnecessary. The liberal says the way to prevent war is here, and now, and does not depend on the millennium. The liberal says slums are unnecessary. One-third of a nation does not have to be ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed. More than ninety per cent of American families do not have to have less than a thousand dollars in the bank to cover all emergencies. Negroes do not have to be lynched. Jews do not have to live in ghettoes. The vast world of misunderstanding between Russia and America can be shrunk to narrow measure, perhaps eliminated. The death of a Hindu affects you in Manchester. The same moon rises over Vladivostok and Portsmouth. The liberal knows all this; he has learned the great truth which Wendell Willkie discovered as new, the world is one;118 and the liberal wants you, the student of today, the citizen of tomorrow, to understand the organic unity of life. The truth is inseparable. It hangs together. All links make the chain. The liberal deals in truth. It is the only thing he offers and he wants you to keep it and to share it—for only by sharing it do you keep it. “I’m a little guy,” you say. That’s what the funny boys say too. “There’s no use. We’re too small. Nobody cares how I vote or if I vote at all.” The funny boys see only the weeds in the garden. They have forgotten what the roses smell like. No man is little. No soul is lost. The shooting star does not drop out of Heaven. What you do is important. The influence you exert is limitless. The word you speak, the smile you give, the song you sing, are stones rippling and spreading to the uttermost corners of the globe. You affect humanity. You are never single. You can never walk alone. You are a member of the human race. And the best way to help your family is to seek the truth; in politics, in art, in society. The conservative is content with what he has; he never seeks. Only the liberal goes on, restless and assured of an eventual triumph greater than that known by the conservative. The liberal does not stand at all. He moves forever forward. He will plant roses in the midst of weeds for the sun will rise and make them sweet with love; and he will go on and plant more, and more, and he will never stop. The liberal wants a peace in our time, but one not merely of our time; he wants it for our children’s children, but not at the cost of our children’s lives; he knows that true peace comes only through understanding, the chamois polishing the gigantic mirror of truth. He knows and wants you to know. His fight is a good one, his planting a real benefit. Help him in the fight. Help him dig through the redding earth. Lift high the leaf and God will make a sound. There is no end to what you may accomplish.

What is perhaps most striking in this piece is the sheer romanticism of it and its commitment to compassion as a core value. Orel, like Paul Wilson

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Sullivan (who exalted his “prophets” as the “hardest of realists and the wisest of economists”119 and insisted that the “power realists” were irrational visionaries), makes no pretense of being a “hard-nosed realist”— in fact, he repudiates and mocks such a position, equating it with the conservative, who is “content with what he has” and “never seeks.” In other words, there is a smallness, a narrowness, a shortsightedness to the conservative’s view that prevents him or her from seeing a larger and also deeper truth. Conservatives are the “funny boys” who “no longer believe in anything.” The dismissive term “funny boy” is rhetorically effective, dismissing the conservative as someone who, being funny, is not serious and, even more, is shallow, divorced from the realities of life and unwilling to relate to them. By implication, they do not feel the pain of others, that Rooseveltian one-third of a nation (already anachronistic in what was fast shaping up to be an era of unprecedented prosperity) that was “ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed,” but they are also dead to the positive side of life; they see the cultivation of beauty as a “luxury” and, in fact, “see only the weeds in the garden” and “have forgotten what the roses smell like.” As one who “no longer believes in anything,” who is dead to life’s possibilities, the conservative has lost part of his or her humanity. In the conservative’s world “nobody cares” what you do. And most importantly, conservatives subscribe to a belief system whose view of reality renders them impotent. If the possibility of making creative change is offered to them, they say, “There’s no use. We’re too small.” And this seems to be Orel’s assessment of the “hard-nosed realist”; he or she is the bloodless cynic who, in the words of Oscar Wilde’s Lord Darlington, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”120 Orel’s liberals, by contrast, are dreamers and proud of it; in that dreaming Orel finds not only a higher reality but a more pragmatic approach to reality and to the positive transformation of reality. In fact, we find Orel very much in line with the attitude, reasoning, and beliefs espoused by Pope in the “Essay on Man.” Dreams involve possibilities; possibilities give rise to action; action is transformative. His central image is the “weed-overgrown garden of the world.” One can fatalistically accept what exists, a weedy garden, as basic immutable reality, or one can approach the garden as something to be cultivated, a place in which choices can be made that will create nourishment and beauty. In finding a conjunction of human potency with natural forces, this exposition of contrasting choices echoes a dichotomy that has its roots in the Enlightenment. There seem to be two general strains of thought concerning the human relationship to natural law, the divide lying between those who take the approach of the scientist, who find in the work of the great early social thinkers like Locke and Smith working hypotheses that are valuable inasmuch as they bring to light conditional truths that are open to revision, and those who take the view of the religionist, finding in those hypotheses final and immutable truths, to be maintained

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as inviolable at all costs. The latter, prominent in the thinking of postSmithean market economists, takes an essentially passive position visà-vis natural law: human society should be ordered in such a way as to mirror the natural order, which, as François Quesnay wrote, “for obvious reasons constitutes the most perfect order.” Quesnay goes on to say that “[t]he study of human jurisprudence is not at all sufficient to produce capable statesmen; those who devote themselves to public administration must be instructed also in the principles of the natural order, which is most advantageous to men organized in society.”121 Implicit here is the belief—adopted by Adam Smith as well122—that natural law is beneficent, that that part of human suffering that is produced by ourselves comes from acting out of harmony with natural law, and that surrender to it will produce happiness. By the early 19th century, when Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo wrote, the difficulties associated with the Industrial Revolution had started to manifest, and natural law was cast in a different light; it might not be entirely beneficent, but to go against it was to court disaster. Therefore, Malthus argued, “the absolute impossibility from the fixed laws of our nature, that the pressure of want can ever be completely removed from the lower classes of society.” Malthus is in line with the modern conservative, holding that relief of poverty is pernicious, “strongly calculated to eradicate” the spirit of “independence” that “still remains among the peasantry.” In fact, Malthus believed that “[t]o remove the wants of the lower classes of society, is indeed an arduous task. The truth is, that the pressure of distress on this part of a community is an evil so deeply seated, that no human ingenuity can reach it.”123 All attempts to help will merely make a bad situation worse, and, therefore, the best people can do is to get out of the way and allow natural law to take its course: “Were I to propose a palliative; and palliatives are all that the nature of the case will admit; it should be, in the first place, the total abolition of all the present parish-laws.” In short, to interfere with nature’s laws to help the poor represents a misguided compassion that will create more suffering than would inaction. Later in the century, Herbert Spencer echoed this understanding of the relationship of humanity to nature’s laws. In The Man Versus the State, Spencer suggested that [s]ociety as certainly has its governing principles as man has. . . . We see nothing created but what is subject to invariable regulations given by the Almighty, and why should society be an exception? We see, moreover, that beings having volition, are healthy and happy, so long only as they act in accordance with those regulations; and why should not the same thing be true of man in his collective capacity? This point conceded, it follows that the well being of a community, depends upon a thorough knowledge of social principles, and an entire obedience to them [emphasis added].124

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So, humanity’s best chance for well-being lies in an essentially passive obedience to the laws of nature. In Spencer’s case, the natural limitations of these laws are further enhanced by an appeal to divine law: It may be objected that though employment be ever so abundant, and society in its most prosperous state, there will still be numerous cases of distress and destitution. Granted; but what then? It must not be inferred that there needs any public provision for them. In nine cases out of ten, such miseries result from the transgressions of the individual or his parents [no evidence]: and are we to take away the just punishment of those transgressions? [What about charity then?] We are told that the sins of the wicked shall be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation. That visitation may either exhibit itself in mental derangement, bodily disease, or temporal want. . . . But the poor law steps in and says, “As far as I can, I will annul this law.” . . . Perhaps it may be asked, where is the justice, or the advantage, of allowing the child to endure the temporal want resulting from the sins of its parents? There is an advantage, and a great one: The same tendency to immorality which characterized the parent is bequeathed to the offspring—the moral disease requires a cure—under a healthy social condition that cure will be found in the poverty which has followed in its train. The malady provides its own remedy—the poor-law right prevents that remedy from being administered.125 Confronting those who believed that humans must simply be either the (relatively) passive beneficiaries of or (more often) sufferers from natural law were those who believed that natural law was something that could be, within certain boundaries, manipulated to achieve desired results. We find this attitude at least as early as 1597 with Francis Bacon’s aphorism “knowledge is power” summing it up in a nutshell.126 Elaborating further, Bacon wrote, “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.”127 The notion of “commanding nature” is foreign to the strain of thought represented by Malthus, who explicitly sets out to refute the views of the French apostle of human potency, Nicolas de Condorcet. Where Malthus sees a future of constriction and raw hunger—humanity limited by the inexorable laws of nature—Condorcet is willing to bet on the future and paints a picture of a humanity that would become the master of those laws: A very small amount of ground will be able to produce a great quantity of supplies of greater utility or higher quality; more goods will be obtained for a smaller outlay; the manufacture of articles will be achieved with less wastage in raw materials and will make better use

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Conclusion of them. Every type of soil will produce those things which satisfy the greatest number of needs; of several alternative ways of satisfying needs of the same order, that will be chosen which satisfies the greatest number of people and which requires least labor and least expenditure. So, without the need for sacrifice, methods of preservation and economy in expenditure will improve in the wake of progress in the arts of producing and preparing supplies and making articles from them.128

It is to the second of these two tendencies, in alignment with de Condorcet, that Harold Orel and Paul Wilson Sullivan belong, oriented toward attaining concrete results, optimistic that human beings have the intelligence to resolve humanity’s problems if only they have the will and the faith to take action. Orel consigns conservatives to the first category, those who take a passive attitude toward the world because they believe nothing can be done to improve things; therefore, “[t]he conservative is content with what he has; he never seeks,” while the liberal “moves forever forward.” This, in a sense, misrepresents conservatives and conservatism; if we take Burkean conservatism as the type, the correct goal of human beings will be to recognize the best that their own history has handed them and to nurture it. In the face of the unceasing challenge of change, a Burkean conservative could never indulge in the smugness suggested by Orel’s characterization of him or her; however, American conservatives did not tend toward the Burkean model, and also, if we regard Orel’s language as political language—part of the “war by other means”—we can say that the intent is not to inform as much as it is to sway. Political language tends to deal in caricatures when dealing with opponents, and the purpose of a caricature is not to be fair to the object but to capture and exaggerate some essential and easily identifiable feature that will (a) identify the object to the audience, (b) persuade the audience that the oversimplified portrayal does indeed present an essentially true portrait of the original, and (c), in the case of political caricature, delegitimize the object. In this regard, Orel’s portrait suggests some possibly fruitful lines of attack for liberals against conservatives. Orel suggests two models, one of society and one of the universe, which provide a secular justification for his concern about poverty, racism, and human suffering in general. Examined closely, these models are logically mutually incompatible; also, one exemplifies the rhetorical, and therefore political, vulnerability, the other the rhetorical strength of progressive liberalism. On the one hand, Orel posits the “organic unity of life.” Compassion for one’s fellow beings is justified on the basis of an essential oneness among all beings. However, if all beings are literally one, then there is no basis for differentiation. In fact, logically, if all life is one, the “death of a Hindu” would affect “you in Manchester” by killing you. The life of one cannot be identical to the life of all just as the death of one cannot

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be identical to the death of all. The oneness, then, is not in actual identity but rather is expressed when Orel says, later in the same paragraph, that the “truth is inseparable . . . all links make the chain.” However, although the links in a chain may be related and, insofar as they are links, interdependent in some way, they are only links by virtue of the fact that, though related, they are not literally identical. They are separate, though related, entities. That is why you can have a chain at all. But then, wherein does the unity lie? The assertion of unity seems to threaten to annihilate the possibility of individual existence. The very real political consequences of this are illustrated by the Minute Women’s fear of the possibility of a “human ant society.” The evocation of a “human ant society” suggests the loss of individual identity; in fact the ants in question are very like Orel’s links of a chain; there is very little to differentiate one from another, and what matters is the collective entity only—neither the individual link nor the individual ant seems to have much value in and of themselves (unless, perhaps, if one happens to be the individual ant in question). Orel’s worldview is unified inasmuch as moral values, aesthetics, and material progress—again, as with Paul Wilson Sullivan—are conceived as undifferentiable. It is only with this understanding that we can understand the juxtaposition of “luxuries such as flowers” (which clearly are not meant to be understood as luxuries at all) with the litany of “slums,” “pinched faces of children without hope,” “standing armies,” “lynched Negroes,” “lies,” “unhappiness,” and, finally “war.” The list itself is revealing in its combination of the tangible (slums, pinched faces—implying hunger— standing armies, lynchings, and war) and the intangible (hopelessness, unhappiness). Because the world is a world of possibilities, these things can be changed. The final question Orel addresses that his liberal elders doggedly avoid is why should they be changed? Why should I, a Caucasian, care that African Americans are lynched? Why should I care that children who are not mine experience hunger and hopelessness? What business is it of mine? What concern is it of mine? The importance of the answer to this question should not be underestimated—in fact, the approach to it represents the critical divide between modern liberals and modern conservatives. The question itself involves metaphysics and ontology. At its heart lies another question, which is: what is the relationship between self and other? And that brings up yet another question, which is: what is a “self” anyway? The issue of individualism is a difficult one in liberalism; it is central to the ideology, and yet defining what constitutes an individual is problematic. There is general agreement that liberty is a, if not the, central value of all liberalisms, classical and modern. And liberty, in the world of common sense at least, is a quality that can only make sense if attached to an entity, in the case of liberalism, the individual human being. However, the precise meanings of both these terms, “liberty” and “individual,” are contested. Now Mrs. Thatcher told us that “there is no such thing as society; there are only individuals”; this, however, puts us in significant logical

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difficulties because if only the individual has real existence, then there is no basis for positing relationship. If an individual is a self-contained entity, then what happens to that “self-containment” when one is engaged in a relationship of any sort—friendship, love, enmity—with another individual? What, for that matter, is a relationship? If one individual can be affected by another (and experience seems to indicate that this is the case), then the integrity of said individual is no longer absolute; it has been compromised inasmuch as the supposedly atomistic individual has become permeable, so to speak. In other words, any individual becomes, in effect, something different when in contact with other individuals. So, is the individual as thing real? Or the relationship? Or the “individual in relationship”? Or all the individuals/things taken together (society)? And in that case, what happened to the separate individuals? Were they subsumed into the bigger thing? Or do they continue to exist as individual things? And, if so, how? I am hoping that by now I have made it clear that these questions are not simply the otherworldly abstractions they might appear to be at first glance; if ontological assertions are at the core of political ideologies, then some formulation—whether logical or illogical does not necessarily matter—is necessary for conducting successful political offensive and defensive activities. The individual of conservatism—the “atomistic” individual—is an odd creature because supposedly it is a creature cut off by its walls from all other creatures. Yet it must be in relationship with them, or else it would be an utterly isolated being, which we know is not the case. If we take market relations as the model—which, given the dicta of famous conservatives like William Graham Sumner, seems to be a reasonable thing to do—we find that the only social action this creature voluntarily engages in is getting and the amount gotten is always “as much as possible,” while the amount given is always “as little as possible” and is always engaged in involuntarily. Modern liberals, on the other hand, clearly occupy a middle ground, one between radical individualism (isolated individuals) and radical collectivism (no individuals). Their occupation of the center ground means that, as Paul Wilson Sullivan noted, they are constantly faced with the philosophical equivalent of a two-front war, while the complexity of their position puts them in a poor position to defend themselves against attacks from either the left or the right in the propaganda war that is modern mass politics. As we have already seen, liberals like Schlesinger, Hall, and Heilig often attempt to counter with an analysis that equates far right with far left, but this is an ineffective rhetorical ploy since it neither acknowledges nor takes a position on the underlying issue: the relationship of the individual to the collective, or, for that matter, to each other. The one liberal theory of the relationship of the individual to society that we have seen articulated in these pages is the Deweyan view, i.e., that individuals do not exist a priori but rather are created by society and are,

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in fact, society’s highest and most important creation. The problem with Dewey’s formulation for present purposes is a political one; his view, be it true or false, is (1) bloodless and highly abstract, (2) difficult for the uneducated person or unmotivated person to grasp, and (3) too complex for the person who doesn’t want to put time into reading John Dewey, i.e., most people. Taken together, these facts mean that it cannot function as a useful basis for vote-getting, a never-to-be-forgotten factor in political thinking and communication.

Resolving the Liberal Dilemma In fact, neither the idealistic and romantic college liberals nor their more dour public elders give adequate expression to the actual tenets of welfare state liberalism. We can extrapolate these from a consideration of liberal policy positions. First of all, liberals espouse the market; markets are composed of individuals acting from motives of self-interest, whether buying or selling. The acceptance of markets also implies the acceptance of material inequality since conditions of competition never lead to equal results for all participants. The liberal’s acceptance of the market and market relations implies an acceptance of contest, of winning and losing, of inequality. The market itself embodies a bifurcated structure, susceptible in its entirety neither to a conflict nor to a consensus interpretation: buying/selling is the basic activity of the market, and in buying and selling there is always a commonalty that brings purchaser and vender together, which is then succeeded by a rivalry, on the one side for the cheapest price, on the other for the highest price. Neither can ever be said to be more than conditionally content with what they get, since the perfect price for each is diametrically opposed: free for the purchaser and infinitely high for the vendor. So, liberals accept the principle of individuals acting in opposition to each other for the sake of self-aggrandizement. On the other hand, liberals do not embrace completely free markets nor, as their espousal of programs like minimum wages, government-sponsored old age pensions, and government-sponsored health care shows, do they deem acceptable the extremes of what the market can mete out to those who lose in them, i.e., starvation, homelessness, and death. So liberals stand neither entirely for self nor entirely for other, neither entirely for conflict nor entirely for harmony; they occupy a central position, whether vital or not, in positing individuals in relationship one to another, relating both in the exploitative mode posited by the market model and also in the relationship of mutual care extolled by romantic liberals like Sullivan and Orel, both taking and giving. It is just this position—standing for balance—that makes liberalism so difficult to define and to defend; it stands neither entirely for self nor for other but rather for individual selves in multifaceted relationships with each other. So how might liberals contend with this inescapable and politically difficult complexity? Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed it in a speech

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he gave in Marietta, Ohio, in 1938 in which he spoke of the relationship among citizens being analogous to that of neighbors in the early frontier days; there were tasks that people could not accomplish on their own or, like raising a barn, that would be overwhelmingly arduous if done individually. And so, people helped each other, making a better life available to all through cooperation. And one important tool of cooperation, Roosevelt argued, was government, which, to the early settlers, “was but another form of the cooperation of good neighbors.” He argued that these people, agreeing with Abraham Lincoln’s opinion that “[t]he legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot do so well, for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities,” saw government, not as conservatives do “as a thing apart—as a power over our people,” but “as a power of the people, as a democratic expression of organized self-help.” However, the contemporary world is one in which the metaphor of neighborhoods peopled by helpful neighbors might seem less convincing than it did in 1938 when that speech was given. So, what might serve in its place? Harold Orel’s article contains another metaphor, dropped carelessly, that contains the potential for acting as the basis of both a powerful defense and an assertion of a progressive liberalism that seeks to maintain individualism while promoting social integration; Orel writes about “the best way to help your family [emphasis added].” We have already seen George Lakoff postulating the family as the core metaphor for the nation for both conservatives and liberals, and I have challenged the propriety of the application of that metaphor for conservatives and have discussed the difficulties it poses for liberals. However, for liberals the image of the family still has perhaps the greatest potential since it is one that not only acknowledges the existence of both the self, that is, the individual, and the group but also suggests a basis of association between the two, i.e., love. Orel is explicit about this, writing, “He [the liberal] will plant roses in the midst of weeds, for the sun will rise and make them sweet with love.” There is nothing especially new about this; Per Albin Hansson, the first Swedish socialist prime minister, coined the metaphor of “People’s home” (Folkhemmet) in a speech before the Swedish Parliament in 1928 in which he suggested that traditional class relations should be replaced by a society marked by mutual care whose concrete expression would be welfare state policies that would give protection to and enhance life’s possibilities for all members of the nation/family. As a model, the family suggests a model for self and other, both other individuals and the group as a whole, in harmonious relationship. In the family as an ideal type, there is plenty of room for individuality and for differences. Everybody need not be the same, and everybody need not be equal; one need not practice complete self-abnegation, but there is no room for utter selfishness. In such a family, there is room for squabbling, there is room for opposition, but there is

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no room for family members abandoning each other or exploiting each other. The family provides security for all but requires responsibility and contribution from all. It may include a wealthy aunt and a poor cousin, but in the ideal family, while the wealthy aunt may remain rich, the poor cousin will not be allowed to starve, and his/her children’s basic needs will be seen to. The challenge, but also the political opportunity in a political war predicated on terms of inclusion/exclusion, lies in the question, who is in the family and who is not? If the nation is a family, then the nation’s citizens could be asserted to be the family members, and one could argue that to love America—to be patriotic—is to love Americans. Naturally, in a highly racially, culturally, and ethnically diverse country like the United States, this is a much more explosive question than in the homogeneous Sweden of the 1930s. Lakoff argues that the family metaphor is already embedded in our political discourse, but I am arguing that it is not, that the task for liberals would be to change the discourse so that the family model would be embedded in it and on an extremely inclusive basis. To turn this into a widely accepted social/political model would not be the work of a day, a week, or even a year, but would require the same kind of long-term, single-minded, and unremitting commitment by liberals to redefining the terms of the national debate that conservatives have shown over the decades since the inception of the New Deal. Moreover, adopting this metaphor would require the renunciation of the liberal aversion to essentialism, replaced by a straightforward articulation of the simultaneous existence of the individual and the group. Oscar Wilde is said to have commented that “[m]orality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” The drawing of a line, the assertion of a difference, is in itself an act of ontological assertion. The line is a statement that “this is different from that.” The line, by its nature then, predicates a “this” and a “that.” It may be illogical, and it may be logically indefensible, but without it there is only confusion and impotence. This said, the conscious adoption of the nation-as-family metaphor provides a viable basis for both attack and defense. However, to be effective, a political ideology needs to go further than this: it must serve as a source of inspiration. Among the nations of the modern world, for better or for worse, the ideology of nationalism—the love of country—has been a central political fact for many years, and for denizens of the United States it has been central since its inception. And the word “love” is not too strong to denote any sentiment that inspires people to put someone or something ahead of their own self-interest. Going back to the very genesis of the United States as an independent nation, the last sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” When people pledge their lives to

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an endeavor with the understanding that their undertaking risks death, they are effectively saying that there is something more important than their individual existences, something that they love more than they love themselves. We have already examined a conservative, Calvin Coolidge, trying to reconcile individualism with nationalism and patriotism, by trying in essence to shrink patriotism into self-interest, and we have examined the logical difficulties that arise with that. Again, those difficulties arise because love of that larger entity, whatever it may be, and devotion to its success may involve substantial sacrifices, up to and including loss of life. So how could a liberal vision inspire such devotion, one that, while not precluding self-love, goes beyond a narrow love of self? Any family is defined by a line—one that demarcates inside and outside. The predominant sentiment among those on the inside, among members of a well-functioning family, the kind most of us would want to be part of, is love, or, at least, feelings of mutual warmth and benevolence. In terms of something as large as the “American family,” it might be unreasonable to expect feelings as powerful as those we ascribe to love to predominate, but liberals would be working to recast social norms so that, at the very least, one would be expected to care about the general well-being of one’s fellow family members—American citizens. And for the family itself—the nation—one would be expected to feel love. That expectation already exists, but as presently constituted, it does not explicitly include caring for the members of the nation. Again, support can be found for this in the train of political thought that reaches back to the very beginning of US history. The Declaration of Independence famously sets out what has been for many, if not most, Americans a brief set of fundamental aspirations; the nation was to be a polity that affords its citizens “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The crisis of the Great Depression led Franklin Roosevelt to insist that if these are truly rights, that is, things to which all American citizens are entitled, then there is an implied right to the supporting conditions that will allow life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be realized—otherwise those are just empty words, an empty promise. Developing this logic in his address to the 1936 Democratic convention, FDR told his listeners that “[a]n old English judge once said: ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’” He went on to tell of how in the United States a “small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness” and that while the “royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government . . . they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business.”129 Roosevelt came back to this theme in his 1944 State of the Union Address, telling Congress, “We

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have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’”130 Returning to the “nation as family” metaphor, with this understanding, family members who want to exclude other family members or who are able to, but who are unwilling to, contribute to the care of other family members, who, whether through youth, age, or infirmity, are not able to take care of themselves, these uncaring family members could be said to be bad family members. Those who are uncaring toward their fellow citizens—fellow Americans—could be considered unpatriotic and, in fact, un-American. Harold Orel’s “funny boys,” his conservatives, claim to be hard-nosed realists who denigrate liberals as feckless dreamers with “two feet planted firmly in the air.” However, where the acolyte of McCarthy and Reagan would attack the liberal—who occupies a centrist position on property—and liberalism as anti-individualistic and un-American, Orel raises the possibility of a positive liberal ideology that asserts the existence of a broad-based and mutually supportive American family and that, on that basis, can attack the ideology of conservatism at its root and in its entirety, not only as un-American but also as un-human, inhuman, and, with regard to bettering the lot of the members of the American family, impotent.

Notes 1. Quoted in Gail Collins, “Mr. Smith Goes to Anchorage,” The New York Times, September 15, 2010. 2. Ronald Reagan, Presidential Radio Address, July 23, 1988. 3. The New York Times, July 24, 1988, 1. 4. Timothy Garton Ash, “A Liberal Translation,” The New York Times, January 24, 2009. 5. For more on this, see Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s–1950s,” The American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (April 1970): 1046–1064. 6. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: The Free Press, 1960), 405. 7. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1. 8. Ibid., 2. 9. Ibid., 76. 10. Ibid., 1. 11. Ibid., 3. 12. Ibid., 125. 13. Ibid., 54. 14. Ibid., 62. 15. Ibid., 3. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 134. 18. Ibid., 54. 19. Ibid., 64.

252 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Conclusion Ibid., 62. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 70–71. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). Ibid., 233. Ibid., 232. The Declaration makes reference to “a design to reduce [the colonies] under absolute Despotism” and also to King George’s intention of establishing “an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Rogin, 217. David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (New York: Cassel, 1994). Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 20. Murray B. Levin, Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 178. Ibid., 4. Lipset and Raab, xvii. Kovel, 389. Ibid., x. Ibid., xi. Levin, 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 3. Lipset and Raab, 14–15. Ibid., 428. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Levin, 149. Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., 6. Kovel, 11. Levin, 236–237. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 230??? Ibid., 226. Bennett, 8. Ibid., 12. Levin, 239–240. Ibid., 235. Ibid., 234. Ibid., 233. Lipset and Raab, 10.

Conclusion 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

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Ibid., 13. Kovel, 9. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 199. Ibid. Levin, 237. Kovel, 5. Lipset and Raab, 6. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 20. John Dewey, “The Future of Liberalism,” The Journal of Philosophy 32, no. 9 (April 25, 1935): 226. Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism,” Italian Encyclopedia, 1932. George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 16. Lakoff, 153–154. Ibid., 65–78. Ibid., 108–118. Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations & the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 11. Robert Booth Fowler, Believing Skeptics: American Political Intellectuals, 1945–1964 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 117. See Fowler, Chapter 5. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, February 3, 1955, 2. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, an Enquiry into the Conditions of the Abject Poor (1883), Charles Booth, Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1902) and Seebohm Rowntree Poverty, A Study of Town Life (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1901). For an extended treatment of the connection between Mill and the New Liberals, see David Weinstein, Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). William James, What Pragmatism Means. Morris Dickstein, “Pragmatism Then and Now,” in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 3–4. Dewey, “The Future of Liberalism,” 226–227. Fowler, 95. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949), 57. Rogin’s The Intellectuals and McCarthy remains one of the best explications of the liberal adherence to pluralism, 267–282. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Eisenhower Won’t Succeed,” The New Republic, April 5, 1954, 12. Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 142.

254 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122.

Conclusion Ibid., 143. Schlesinger, 183. Ibid. The most extensive treatment of the political role of economic growth in the postwar era is Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1995), 233. Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 126. Ibid., 133. John W. Sloan, Eisenhower and the Management of Prosperity (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991). Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 202. Brinkley, 167. Rogin, 218. Alan Brinkley, “World War II and American Liberalism,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, eds. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 315. Collins, More, 52. Paul Krugman, “A Tale of Two Moralities,” The New York Times, January 13, 2011. John F. Kennedy, Acceptance Speech of the New York Liberal Party Nomination, September 14, 1960. Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 44. Giving USA 2006, a publication of the Giving USA Foundation, researched and written by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 419. Pegler first used the term “bleeding heart” in a 1938 column in the New York Telegram castigating liberals in Washington for their focus on “a bill to provide penalties for lynchings.” Quoted by K. A. Cuordileone, “‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949–1960,” The Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 521. Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy (New York: Workers Party of America, 1922), 64. This is a reference to Wilkie’s 1943 publication, One World, a plea for international peacekeeping after the war. Sullivan, The New Hampshire, December 2, 1954, 2. Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act III. François Quesnay, “General Rules for the Economic Government of an Agricultural Kingdom (1758),” History of Economic Thought: A Book of Readings, K. William Kapp and Lore L. Kapp, eds. (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc, 1949), 103. Economist Jacob Viner wrote that “Smith’s major claim to fame seems to rest on his elaborate and detailed application to the economic world of the concept of unified natural order, operating according to natural law, and if left to its own course producing results beneficial to mankind.” Jacob Viner, “Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire,” in J. M. Clark, et al., Adam Smith, 1776–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 118.

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123. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: J. Johnson 1798). 1st edition. 124. Spencer, 184. 125. Ibid., 203–204. 126. Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. and trans. Basil Montagu (London: William Pickering, 1825), 219. 127. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Part I, Aphorism III, Vol. 8 (Boston: Taggard & Thompson, 1863), 67–68. 128. Nicolas de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Future Progress of the Human Mind (London: Johnson, 1795), 344. 129. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Speech before the 1936 Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 27, 1936. 130. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Economic Bill of Rights,” in the 1944 Annual Message to Congress, January 11, 1944. In Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950), 13:40–42.

Index

academic freedom 31, 54, 94, 99, 101, 121, 125, 146, 176, 183, 187–189 passim Acheson, Dean 110, 112, 131, 135, 146, 160n80 American Legion 21, 85, 148 American Youth for Democracy (AYD) 21–35 passim, 47n9, 47n15 Arens, Richard 21, 74 Ash, Timothy Garton 203, 251n4 Bacon’s Rebellion 8 Bailyn, Bernard 211, 252n25 Battle, John S. 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 125, 128, 132, 134, 142, 158n44, 159n56 Bazemore, Curt 102, 103, 104 Bell, Daniel 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 20n10, 20n12, 203, 205, 213, 228, 229, 251n6 Bennett, David H. 212, 214, 215, 216, 252n30, 252n57 Bernstein, Eduard 7 Bilbo, Sen. Theodore G. 24, 27, 31, 46n7 Black, Barron F. 124, 133, 137, 145, 159n66, 161n98 Board of Visitors, University of Virginia 113, 122, 123, 124, 128, 131, 136, 144, 147, 158n37, 159n67, 160n73, 160n81, 160n85, 160n90, 161nn92–93 Bohm, Ralph 55, 65–66, 67 Bonar, James 153 Brinkley, Alan 12, 156, 162n123, 230, 232, 254n101, 254n106, 254n108 Broatch, Allison 24, 33, 34, 43 Bruns, Gene 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 147

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 71, 90n52 Budenz, Louis 134 Bullitt, William C. 21, 22 Burns, Bernard T. 22–28 passim, 31, 32, 33 Business Response to Keynes, The 231 Byrd, Sen. Harry F. 105, 111, 128, 131, 132, 136, 160nn83–88 Callum, Carl 52 Carnegie, Andrew 233, 234, 238 Caro, Robert 237, 254n114 Cater, Douglass 59 Cavalier Daily, The 93–146 passim “Cerebrus” 99–100, 102–105, 122, 126–127, 129, 144, 157, 160 Chase, Charles 36, 48n33 Church, Mildred W. 57 Clarke, Edward Young 85 Clausewitz, Karl von 50, 68, 88n1 Clough, Marshall 28–29 Collins, Robert M. 12, 231, 254n100, 254n105, 254n109 Committee on Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia 120, 122 communism 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 10, 17, 18, 21, 22, 25–29, 30, 32, 36, 37, 42, 44–46, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 66–67, 68, 74, 85, 89n40, 93, 94–95, 96–97, 98, 101, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 156, 176, 177, 179, 180–182, 183, 185, 186, 188–189, 190, 195, 203, 213, 218, 228 Communist Control Act of 1954 2, 20n4, 20n8 Communist Party 1, 2, 3, 21, 22, 23, 30, 35, 38, 40, 44, 46, 48n33, 51, 52, 60, 112, 135

Index Conference of New England Newman Clubs, The 35 Conference on Religion in College Life (CORICL) 173, 174 Confucius 87, 92n92 Connolly, William E. 68, 90n43, 206 conservatism 1, 4–5, 10, 17, 19, 20, 76, 81, 86, 148–149, 152, 153–156, 184, 185, 195, 203, 204, 205, 212, 219, 221, 244–246, 251 Coolidge, Calvin 155, 162n120, 221, 250 Countertide 18, 50 Cullen, Hugh Roy 54 Czar, Jonathan 22 Daily Campus, The 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 50, 52, 53, 59, 68, 87, 161n106 Darden, Colgate W., Jr. 105, 107, 108, 113, 114, 116–117, 119, 121, 124, 125, 131–132, 143–145 passim, 158 Darden, Ida 54, 89n18 Dawley, Alan 84 de Condorcet, Nicolas 243, 244 Delton, Jennifer 11, 14 de Tocqueville, Alexis 215, 216, 223 Dewey, John 9, 17, 106, 156, 164, 166–167, 190, 191, 219, 225, 227, 245–247 Dickstein, Morris 227 Dillard, Hardy 105, 107, 124, 143 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 106, 196 doughface 233, 238, 239 Douglas, William O. 179 Dowd, Gregory 224 Dukakis, Michael S. 201, 202 Dumont, Louis 77, 79 Du Pont, Pierre, Irenee, Lammot 4, 148, 150 Durkheim, Émile 8, 76–77, 78, 91nn68–69 Ebert, Friedrich 7 Economic Bill of Rights 11 Eisenhower, Dwight David 12, 13, 114, 120, 183, 184, 230, 231 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 86, 176 Engels, Friedrich 7, 74 “Essay on Man” 236, 241 Fagan, Hugh 129 Fairbank, John K. 125, 159–160n72

257

Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) 24, 46–47n8, 96, 115, 129, 131, 135, 142, 143, 148, 158n50 Faris, James 131 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 2, 26, 28, 38, 43, 48n33, 88n5, 101, 104, 134, 135, 182 “Federalist 10” 6, 229 Federalist Party 69 Femia, Joseph 71, 72 Fernbach, Alfred P. 105, 106, 107, 108, 112, 114, 116, 118, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138–140, 142, 143, 147 Fish, Leonard 33 Flynn, John T. 125–126, 142, 160n74, 160n91 Folkhemmet (People’s Home) 17, 248 Foster, Carol Harris 43, 48n33 Fowler, Robert Booth 225, 228 Frances Sweeney Committee 50 Frechette, Arthur 32, 35 Freeden, Michael 8, 9, 204, 206–209 passim, 220, 221 Friends of Democracy 63 Galbraith, John Kenneth 9, 15, 203 Gallie, W. B. 68 Gange, John 105–106, 108–109, 111–136 passim, 138, 139, 140–145 passim, 147 Gary, Elbert H. 74 Gentile, Giovanni 219, 221 Gerich, Robert 52, 61–62, 66 Gerson, Lou 50, 68, 87, 88, 156 Gerstle, Gary 231 Gibbs, Jack P. 76 Goeller, T. 96, 98, 99 Gooch, Robert Kent 105, 124, 143 Gould, Jay 7 Graham, Frank Porter 118, 159n55 Gramsci, Antonio 7, 8, 70, 71–72 Gredler, Gilbert 36–41 passim, 44, 48n33 Green, James F. 21 Green, Thomas Hill 166, 190, 226 Griswold, Whitney 93 Groves of Academe, The 100 Hale, Oron J. 105, 124 Hall, Gordon 18, 50–54 passim, 57–64 passim, 67, 88n5 Hansen, Alvin 230

258

Index

Hansson, Per Albin 248 Harrison III, Marion 100, 103 Hartford Courant, The 22, 29, 63 Harvard Crimson, The 132, 64 hegemony 5, 7, 70–74, 84 Heilig, Mendel 56, 66 –67, 88, 156, 246 Heller, Walter 232 High, Stanley 53 Hill, Laird 94 Hill, Pete 25, 35 Hinkle, Douglas 129, 142, 143 Hiss, Alger 115, 120, 130, 146, 160n79, 184 Hocking, William Ernest 167, 191, 199n126 Hofstadter, Richard 69 holism 8, 77, 81–85, 196 Hook, Sidney 30, 164, 188 Hoover, Herbert 12 Hoover, J. Edgar 2, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) 21, 47n16, 74 Humphrey, Sen. Hubert Horatio 1–3 passim, 10 Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, The 211 ideology 9, 11, 13–14, 15, 69–70, 72, 74, 135, 145, 155, 156, 183, 186, 189, 193, 204–209, 213, 219, 220, 221, 225, 232, 235–236, 245, 250, 251 individualism 17, 19, 43, 77–82, 85, 86, 153–157, 161–162n115, 166–167, 174–175, 176, 177, 185, 190, 191, 195, 216, 218–219, 221, 227, 235–237, 246, 248, 250 James, William 15, 16, 226 “Jeffersonian” 97, 98 Johnson, Lyndon Baines 237 Jones, Jesse H. 105, 131, 132 Jones III, Richard E. 100–101, 129 Jorgensen, Albert N. 22, 27, 35 Kamp, Joseph P. 119–120 Kempton, Murray 3 Kennedy, John F. 232 Kerr, James A. 104 Kinnucan, Paul F. 120, 130, 131 Kovel, Joel 212, 213, 215, 217, 218

Krugman, Paul 232 Ku Klux Klan 47n16, 51, 54, 57, 58, 82, 84, 85, 148 Laclau, Ernesto 72–73 Lakoff, George 151, 204, 221, 222–224 passim, 248, 249 Lattimore, Owen 51, 59, 60, 125, 159–160n72 Lehman, Eugene H., Jr. 33–34, 43 Leland, Lieutenant Colonel Stanley J. 107 Lerner, Max 157 Levin, Murray B. 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 Lewis, Fulton, Jr. 64 Lewis, Ivey F. 117, 120, 143 Liberal Club, The 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 48n33 liberalism 1, 4, 5–6, 9, 11–12, 13, 14, 18, 30, 39, 41–42, 44, 52, 96, 129, 131, 149–151, 152, 156–157, 163, 166, 185, 186, 189–191, 193, 199n126, 203, 216, 219, 225–230, 232, 235, 237, 244–245, 247–251 Liberal Tradition in America, The 216 Liberty League, The 4, 148, 227 Lichtenstein, Nelson 230 Lipset, Seymour 212, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219, 229 Luker, Kristin 83 MacLean, Nancy 82, 84, 85 Madison, James 6, 75, 229 Malthus, Thomas 153, 242, 243 Mansfield, Sen. Michael 1 Man versus the State, The 154, 242 Marder, Alfred L. 22–33 passim, 45 Markward, Mary Stalcup 135 Marshall Plan 97, 101, 102, 106, 115, 158n18 Martin, Walter T. 76 Marx, Karl 2, 7, 74, 145, 149, 170, 227 Marxism, Marxist 28, 70, 93, 94, 149–150, 166, 188, 229 McAuliffe, Mary S. 4 McCarthy, Mary 100, 127 McCarthy, Sen. Joseph 2, 3, 56, 93, 128, 146, 155, 179, 183, 184, 237 McCarthyism 4, 64, 146, 176, 177, 178, 182–187 passim, 195, 212, 231

Index McFarland, Bill 100 Mead, Margaret 228 Mead, R.G. 55 mechanical solidarity 76–77, 78 Medesy, William A. 39 Micaud, Charles 105, 106, 108, 112, 116, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136 –138, 143, 147 Miller, Don 104 Millis, Walter 5 Minute Women of the USA 18, 51 Moger, Allen W. 93–94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 147 Moidel, Jack 52, 89n12, 89n40 Moral Politics 151, 222 Morgan, Edmund 8 Morse, Arthur D. 53, 54, 203 Morse, Sen. Wayne 1 Mouffe, Chantal 72–73 Mullendore, William Clinton 150 Mullins, Eustace 145–146 Munger, Robert 59 Mussolini, Benito 8, 21, 24, 27, 137, 219–221 National Christian Crusade 51 National Council for American Education 53 National Resource Planning Board 11, 230 Nedelsky, Jennifer 8, 75, 151, 152 Newcomb, John Lloyd 105, 107 Niebuhr, Reinhold 42, 45, 48n39, 229, 238 Nielson, Carl 25–26 Offe, Claus 71 “Open Minded” 96–97 Orel, Harold 20, 239–241, 244–245, 247, 248, 251 organic solidarity 76–77, 91n69 Packard, Laurence B. 37 Parekh, Bhikhu 206 Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History, The 212, 213, 214, 215 Pasvolsky, Leo 131, 135, 160nn79–80 Pells, Richard H. 11 People’s Charter of 1838 6, 7 Phillips-Fein, Kim 148 Pifer, John M. 129, 130

259

Pinkevich, Richard 32, 45 Pite, A. Michael 55, 88 pluralism 1, 9, 14, 15, 196, 212, 217, 218, 228, 235 “PMC” 94–95, 96, 99, 147, 157 Point Four 97, 101, 115, 140, 158n49 Polanyi, Karl 84 Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression 212 Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, The, 1790–1977 212, 213 Poole, De Witt C. 151–152, 154, 161n112 Pope, Alexander 228, 236 –237, 239, 241 pragmatism 1, 14–15, 16, 19, 164, 171, 186, 199n126, 224–225, 226–227, 236 property 4, 6, 10, 19, 36, 70, 74–75, 96, 97, 115, 131, 138, 148–153, 156–157, 161–162n115, 217, 228, 250, 251 prophets 191–194 Quesnay, François 242 Raab, Earl 212, 213, 214, 217, 218–219 Rankin, John Elliott 30, 34, 47n16 Reagan, Ronald 4, 13, 201–202, 203, 204, 251 Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America 212 relativism 15, 19, 164, 169, 170–172, 186, 195–196, 204, 224–225, 227 Rhee, Syngman 179, 180 Ricardo, David 153, 242 Richey, Homer Gilmer 7, 10, 18, 30, 93–162 passim, 203 Richmond Times-Dispatch, The 93, 118, 147, 148 Robertson, James D. 56 Rogin, Michael Paul 212 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 4, 11, 12, 15, 16, 45, 97, 135, 139, 151, 182, 234, 247, 248, 250–251 Ross, Carl 22 Rovere, Richard 64 Royal Commission on Trade Unions 7

260

Index

Saloman, Samuel 82 Sapienza, Jerry 31 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr 3, 9, 15, 20n6, 20n13, 30, 45, 67, 89n41, 151–152, 154, 156, 161n113, 164, 188, 203, 228, 229, 233, 234, 328, 246, 253n93 Schmitt, Carl 73 Schrecker, Ellen 23, 64 Schwellenbach, Lewis B. 21, 30 Security, Work, and Relief Policies 230 Self Help 226 Sherwood, Arthur 58, 62–64, 74, 88 Sloan, John W. 231 Smiles, Samuel 226 Smith, Adam 153, 190, 216, 226, 234, 241, 242, 254n122 Smith, Gerald L.K. 50, 57, 62 Smith, Willis 108, 118, 159n55 Spencer, Herbert 153–154, 242–243 Steiner, Bob 51–52, 53, 59–61, 62, 63, 64, 74, 88 Stephens, Joseph Rayner 6 Stevenson, Adlai 3, 13 Stevenson, Edward 51, 52–53, 54, 59, 61, 64 Stevenson, Suzanne Silvercruys 18, 51–52, 53, 54, 57, 61, 62, 67, 161–162n115 Students for America 59 Sullivan, Paul Wilson 7, 14, 19, 156, 163–197 passim, 203, 204, 224, 225, 227, 234, 238, 241, 244, 245, 246, 247 Sumner, William Graham 153, 155, 246 Thatcher, Margaret 154, 162n119, 245 Thomas, J. Parnell 48n32 Thomas, Joseph G. 36

Tönnies, Ferdinand 77 Torfing, Jacob 72–73 Trade Union Act of 1871 7 Tritz, John 121 Trotsky, Leon 238 Truman, Harry S. 11, 21, 47n8, 55, 65, 97, 110, 115, 130, 135, 140, 146, 158nn49–50, 164, 184, 230 Truman Doctrine 134 Tuck, William M. 111, 112–113, 132 Tudisco, Joe 24, 29–30, 45–46 Tyler, Elizabeth 85 Vail, Richard 120, 130 Vital Center, The 7, 19, 67, 151–152, 201, 233, 238 von Hayek, Friedrich 149 von Mises, Ludwig 149 “WAC” 98–99, 102, 148 Wainright, Jonathan M. 53 Wallace, Henry 9, 101, 136, 202, 238 Ward, Harry 24, 47n9 Ward, Patrick J. 54 Ward, Richard Carleton 54–55, 56, 59, 64–67 passim, 88 Washington, Alfred J. 35, 46 Waybright, Edgar W. 18, 54, 57–58 Weber, Max 76 Welborn, H. 56 Whig Party 69 Wood, John S. 63 Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs 95, 105–106, 107, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 129, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144 Young, Bob 37, 39–43, 44, 204 Young Communist League 22–23 Zoll, Allen 53–54