The Legacy of the Anti-Communist Liberal Intellectuals

Ronald Radosh

Nothing seems to trouble a new generation of historians, who came of age in the 1960s, more than the attitude and intellectual positions taken by a small group of liberal intellectuals during the 1950s. This group, forever to be called "the New York intellectuals" since the late Irving Howe named them, have come to be portrayed as a group who squandered their once proud liberal heritage, and who inadvertently gave their support and their backing to the national hysteria that gripped America during the McCarthy years.

Writing two decades ago, the historian Mary S. McAuliffe argued that in rejecting what she mistakenly calls the "American left," when she clearly meant the pro-Communist left, liberals had accepted "the basic assumptions and tactics of the Red Scare itself." McAuliffe argued that the liberal intellectuals excluded Communists "from the arena of permissible public debate and, as a result, lost sight of vital civil liberties." Writing more recently, the historian Ellen Shrecker has provided the basic contemporary indictment: the New York intellectuals, she writes, "functioned as a kind of intelligence service for the [right-wing anti-Communist] network." Although they thought of themselves as different from McCarthyites, they were doing their work for them. They developed both the term "Stalinist" and the concept "totalitarian," both of which, according to Shrecker, muddied the waters by failing to make "distinctions between Stalin’s crimes and Hitler’s and stressing the similarities rather than the differences between Communism and fascism." In allying themselves with the Right to oppose Communists, and in refusing to continue the wartime Popular Front, these New York intellectuals made "their own. . .contribution to the postwar wave of political repression." Indeed, she claims, "the New York intellectuals’ depiction of Communism differed little in its main outlines from that of Joe McCarthy."

Professor Shrecker’s judgment is a harsh one, and it is not unique to her alone. The position she espouses is anti-anti-Communism, and it is a stance that has become all too common. Indeed, the argument gained attention when Lillian Hellman made it in her now famous retrospective look back at the McCarthy years. Reflecting on the views of her old friends Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hellman wrote that the "good magazines" they wrote for, particularly the literary-political journal Partisan Review, failed to stand up substantially to the threat posed by the McCarthyites to America’s intellectual and cultural life. Its editors protested endlessly against the persecution of dissidents in Eastern Europe, she wrote, but "never took an editorial position against McCarthy himself"; nor, she added, did Commentary, although she claimed that Irving Kristol did use its pages to attack McCarthy’s critics. The idea that this intellectual community succumbed to McCarthyism has spread far and wide. The British journalist Godfrey Hodgson, in his widely discussed and influential overview, America In Our Time, thus refers to the "trajectory, in hardly more than a decade, of Partisan Review. . .from dutiful Stalinism through Trotskyite heresy to the bleakest Cold War anti-Communist orthodoxy."

It has become accepted wisdom, evidently, to believe that without the respectability given to anti-Communism by the treason of the New York intellectuals, who abandoned their commitment to intellectual responsibility out of a desire to be accepted as part of the great American celebration, that McCarthy and his orgy of demagoguery would never have been possible. So many decades after the events, the time has finally come to reassess and reevaluate what it was exactly that this small but influential group was saying, and to examine more closely what its response actually was to the emergence of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his postwar crusade.

As a group of intellectuals, the different members were concerned with nuance. Having been aware since the 1930s of the reality of Stalinism, and having developed over the years many legitimate reasons for opposition to American Communism, the intellectuals looked askance at the way in which their concerns were now being bowdlerized and parodied by the likes of Joe McCarthy and his cohorts. Nevertheless, they were concerned with how to deal with very real issues relating to national security, while avoiding indiscriminate witch-hunts against real dissenters and radicals. Most importantly, they never wavered in their understanding that international Communism, and its American affiliate, were serious dangers to the American polity.

Indeed, the issues they debated and the positions they espoused continue to reverberate, as was made clear most recently in the brouhaha over the lifetime recognition award given to director Elia Kazan by the Motion Picture Academy in 1999. To many of the Hollywood left wing, Kazan had committed the unforgivable sin of naming names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and therefore should not have been nominated to receive a major award. To others, Kazan’s political judgments were seen as not so wide of the mark, and they argued that he should be judged only on the merits of his work in cinema.

We can begin our examination by looking first at the incisive arguments made by Diana Trilling, who had been literary editor of the left-wing magazine The Nation, and the wife of Lionel Trilling, perhaps the most esteemed and erudite member of the community. Mrs. Trilling was, as her published diary established, horrified at the crudeness and nastiness of McCarthy’s interrogations. Indeed, Mrs. Trilling made it clear at the start of her diary entry that she was opposed "both to McCarthy and the Communists." Indeed, she confided that she was "alarmed by McCarthyism." Yet, she understood what other liberals failed to comprehend–that "our intense fear of McCarthyism has been nurtured by the Communists and directly serves the Communist purpose." Yet, as she sat by her radio, she would wait in expectation for McCarthy to yell out her name "over the air in that awful accent of righteous condemnation." Nevertheless, she was clear about the main point: "the soi-disant liberals made McCarthyism possible." What she and her friends were pointing out was that had the New Deal and Fair Deal liberals faced the nature of Communism head on, there would have been no vacuum for a Joe McCarthy to enter.

Indeed, Mrs. Trilling insisted that good liberals had two enemies–McCarthy and the Communists–and she rejected even a temporary alliance with either of them. In intellectual circles, it was easy to attack and to condemn McCarthy. But what upset her was that so many of her liberal friends failed to comprehend the "true nature of the Communist danger." To seek to root out Communists from arenas of influence, in Mrs. Trilling’s eyes, was hardly McCarthyite, because it was necessary and correct. Thus, no public figure irritated her more than Lord Bertrand Russell, who years earlier, had been among the first intellectuals to accurately characterize the nature of Soviet Communism.

Mrs. Trilling felt that in the 1950s, Russell had begun to lose the clarity of his early thinking. Russell and other European intellectuals, she noted, were spreading the false idea that the United States was near the condition of Fascist Germany in the 1940s. "The idea that America is a terror-stricken country in the grip of hysteria is a Communist-inspired idea," she wrote, and that so influential a figure as Lord Russell could spread such nonsense was most unsettling. Therefore, unlike Russell, she saw it as a "reasonable function of the legislative body" to investigate "the possibility of subversive influences on Government policy." That meant rallying around the "issue of civil liberties," and denying Congress the right to investigate potential subversion, was in fact giving comfort to Joe McCarthy–who would then be free to abuse power by moving where others feared to tread. Imagine, she asked, if those brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities were pro-Nazi, rather than pro-Communist. Mrs. Trilling pointed out sharply that those liberals who were now so agitated when hearings took place would be the last to object if the subjects of the hearings were on the political far right. Trilling asked rhetorically: "Would the liberal chorus swell so loud, or swell at all in defense of these victims of repression?"

As a tough-minded liberal anti-Communist, Diana Trilling reflected sharply on the meaning of the indictment and conviction of Alger Hiss. While to many liberals the Hiss case exemplified a Republican smear job on the entire New Deal, Mrs. Trilling saw it in a very different way. Indeed, she was hardly shocked at Hiss’s conviction, which she saw as a "retroactive victory" for the anti-Communist liberals, who had always known that some Communists would be guilty of treason to their country. Yet, there was a dilemma to be faced. To cheer his conviction put one in the same camp as the right wing. But the reality was that the liberal had been thrown "into the same camp with forces he detests, or should detest, as much as he detests Communists." Indeed, Mrs. Trilling called the new "enforced alignment between anti-Communist liberals and reactionaries" often "open and distasteful," and thus she sought a way to differentiate their response from that of the political right, from whom she sought a "clean break." Her method was one that would be repeated for years, often to little avail. The anti-Communist liberal, she wrote, must "insist on his right not to be labeled a reactionary just because reactionaries agree with him on this issue." To our present day, Diana Trilling’s point has been ignored, despite many attempts to make the same explanation.

Mrs. Trilling acknowledged that Joe McCarthy’s own hearings seemed to justify the claim of non-Communist and fellow-traveling liberals that a "grand-scale witch-hunt for Communists" in which "innocent liberals would be tarred with the Communist brush" was about to occur. But she did not agree. Hiss, as she pointed out, was not an innocent liberal. Acknowledging that perhaps McCarthy might smear some innocent liberals, she reminded her readers "had it not been for the Un-American Activities Committee, Hiss’s guilt might never have been uncovered." And thus she uttered what until then was the unthinkable: One had to "reserve the possibility that a McCarthy, too, may turn up someone who is as guilty as Hiss."

But it was in her now-forgotten analysis of the Oppenheimer Affair that Diana Trilling was to make her signal contribution to the debate. The mid-1950s hearings before the Gray Commission, in which the nation’s most prominent physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was forced to defend his prewar political alliances and after which his security clearance would be revoked, is often cited as one of the major events that brought fear to the country’s scientific and intellectual community. As usual, Mrs. Trilling had a quite different take on its meaning.

In her eyes, what was revealed by the sordid affair was the very "liberal culture of the time" that allowed an avowed pro-Soviet fellow traveler to receive security clearance in the first place. "The dominant liberal sentiment of the [1940s]," she wrote, "from the White House down," put its "whole blind force on the side of protecting friends of the Soviet Union." In Trilling’s brilliant exegesis, she turned the table on how the Oppenheimer case was viewed. Oppenheimer had his security clearance revoked in 1954, when in her eyes he should have never received it in the first place. "Surely," she wrote, "it was the gravest of risks to trust him with secrets which the Soviet Union wanted so badly." But to then take his clearance away years later, after he had learned how wrong his fellow-traveling views were, was "tragic ineptitude." Hence, he was being punished for the Roosevelt administration’s willingness to be "careless with our nation’s security" during the years of the wartime alliance with Russia.

Moreover, Mrs. Trilling hardly saw the scientist as another victim. "Had Dr. Oppenheimer not once been sympathetic to Communism, there would have been no Oppenheimer case." Hence the issue was not Oppenheimer alone, but her own generation’s refusal to face the truth about Communism. Thus, the hearings could not be seen as "a manifestation of McCarthyism." Many "conscientious, thoughtful men and women" who firmly opposed McCarthy, people like her own group, agreed when examining the evidence brought before the Atomic Energy Commission that Oppenheimer "[did] not meet the tests of a good security risk." And these people, she stressed, were from the "liberal camp."

Diana Trilling thus made refusal to adhere to the tenets of the Popular Front a main principle for comprehending McCarthyism. Men like Oppenheimer, whose own record had been relentlessly pro-Communist, did not. Thus she pointed out that by his own testimony he failed to understand "that there is but a single criterion of a proper knowledge of the nature of the Soviet Union–the awareness that the Soviet Union is a totalitarianism as absolute as that of Nazi Germany. . .and that. . . one also knows how impossible it is for a local Communist Party to be free to pursue its own objectives." McCarthy and his supporters may have screamed "Twenty Years of Treason" as an epithet for the Democratic Party’s years in power. That charge would not have had any merit had mainstream liberalism not been directed at "persuading the American people that Russia was our great ally instead of the enemy of democracy and peace."

Diana Trilling’s point about Hiss and Oppenheimer was treated in a similar fashion by the literary intellectual Leslie Fiedler, in what was to become a much more widely known essay. Fiedler wrote that Hiss was a symbol of "the Popular Front mind at bay, incapable of honesty when there is no hope in anything else." Hiss’s guilt was in fact that of his entire generation of liberals, who shared in his guilt when they defended him. Like Hiss, they argued that "service to the party and the Soviet Union is an expression of ‘loyalty,’ not ‘treason’," since it was preferable to the "bourgeois success of the American Dream" which for the Left was "the final treachery." Hiss, in fact, had attained the pinnacle of success in the nation that he betrayed. He achieved this because it was the Popular Front that allowed him to serve both his own government and the Soviet Union. And well-meaning liberals shared Hiss’s guilt, because they too "collaborated in the hoax" of Soviet-American unity, which had been resurrected after the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

To those liberals, their enemy was Whittaker Chambers, whom they viewed as a "scorned squealer." Hiss was simply a "hopeless liar." Fiedler pointed to the anomaly that not everyone accused by the McCarthyites was innocent. Those who viewed everyone who was left of center as a Red made the same mistake as those who exonerated everyone accused who denied their guilt, that of failing to distinguish between an actual liberal and a Stalinist. The liberals who exonerated Hiss and spent their energy condemning the Un-American Activities Committee out of fear that they would be "playing into the hands of the enemy," were thereby giving the McCarthyites the honor of being the only ones telling the truth. Thus Fiedler saw the Hiss case as that of a generation on trial, one that substituted "sentimentality for intelligence." Its members did not all serve the GPU, but committed a worse sin; they denied its very existence. And so, Fiedler concluded, the "age of innocence" was dead.

If the debate over Alger Hiss’s guilt or innocence was less controversial–for a good many believed that Hiss was guilty–the debate over the charges made against Owen Lattimore, a distinguished China scholar, was a different story. McCarthy, after all, had singled out Lattimore as a major Soviet spy–"Alger Hiss’s boss," he called him. Indeed, the Senator went so far as to claim that he would "stand or fall" on his case against Lattimore, whom he called the "top Soviet espionage agent in the United States." Later he would back down, and say that perhaps he had "placed too much stress on the question of whether he is a paid espionage agent," since the real issue was "his position of tremendous power in the State Department as the ‘architect’ of our Far Eastern policy."

Lattimore fought back, appearing willingly before the Senate to answer the charges. In so doing, he gained the support and backing of most of the liberal community. As Lattimore’s most recent biographer, Robert P. Newman, has written, "in truth [Lattimore] had [no influence] whatsoever"; hence the claim that his policies had led to the "loss of China" were nothing less than preposterous. The eulogy, written by Newman, is perhaps the judgment most held at present. According to him, Lattimore was right in most of his observations; "his track record is remarkable." And Newman concludes that he was "right to hold" both McCarthy and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in contempt, since it was "accumulating perhaps the greatest mass of lies and perjuries ever assembled in the halls of Congress." And he attributes Lattimore’s "refusal to knuckle under, confess imagined sins, or run away" as the factor that perhaps "stiffened the spines of others under attack."

While the attacks on Lattimore were taking place, first from McCarthy and later from the Senate committee chaired by Nevada’s Senator Pat McCarran, the anti-Communist liberal intellectuals responded quite differently. Once again, Diana Trilling looked at the record, and concluded that evidence introduced proved that Lattimore "consistently and consciously undertook to do what the Soviet Union wanted done" in his editorial capacity at the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR). True, she wrote, he was not a "spy or an agent or even a member of the Communist Party." He was, however, "something far more dangerous," an individual who served Communist policy while appearing to be independent. She wrote that he was an honest and independent thinker "whose idealism just happened to coincide with Russian realism." As an intellectual herself, Mrs. Trilling realized that her observations provided a dilemma. One could not legislate those such as Lattimore out of existence, "without simultaneously legislating true independence of thought out of existence too." Her point was, rather, that at least liberals had to be clear about what it was that Owen Lattimore believed.

In a similar fashion, writers for the socialist anti-Communist publication, the New Leader, joined in. Granville Hicks, himself once a literary Communist, reserved his anger for liberals who he thought played into McCarthy’s hands by "rallying with such absolute assurance to Lattimore’s defense," especially since even if he was innocent, "he may still be wrong in his views on China." The publication’s editor, Sol Levitas, wrote that Lattimore was guilty of a worse sin than being a spy. Proclaiming the China scholar to be a "LitAg" of the Kremlin, Levitas wrote that he was an individual who sought to harm American foreign policy by molding public opinion to favor a pro-Soviet course. Such a service made him of more value to Stalin than a thousand other actual American Communists.

Irving Kristol offered by far the most comprehensive view of the Lattimore case. Kristol’s position was made clear in his lengthy and provocative discussion of Owen Lattimore. It was this essay, Diana Trilling had written in her own discussion of Lattimore, that was "the most telling statement I have yet seen of the exact nature of Lattimore’s offense." Kristol did what few other liberal commentators did; he read and learned from the McCarran Committee’s report on the Institute for Pacific Relations. First, Kristol examined Lattimore’s own testimony before the Tydings Committee. Kristol argued that in 1935 and 1936, Lattimore had favored a tough American policy towards Japan, at a time when the Communists "were insisting that the United States intervene to prevent Japan from gobbling up China." Lattimore, in other words, had confirmed exactly how his own positions dovetailed with those of the Soviet Union.

Taking up McCarthy’s charge that it was Lattimore and the other China hands that had lost China, Kristol argued that what they had actually done was support denial of aid to Chiang Kai-Shek unless he agreed to a coalition government with Mao and the Chinese Communists. The inevitable result of their proposals, Kristol argued, would be a result that Lattimore and others "smugly and foolishly thought to be the only ‘constructive’ programme suitable for their advanced political sensibilities." Agreeing that Lattimore "was no spy in the sense that Alger Hiss was," and that McCarthy’s description of him "was irresponsible and wide of the mark," Kristol argued that Lattimore was nevertheless an individual who posed a real danger to American policy. He was, Kristol wrote, a man transported "by the conviction of his own infinite innocence and righteousness." Thus he saw Lattimore as the type of academic who translated Communist dogma into academic rhetoric, where it could not be deciphered easily. Thus, he knew enough not to describe Mao’s Communist troops as "agrarian reformers," as some of the China hands called them–but rather referred to Mao’s Yenan area by "the more pompous, ‘dynamic popular government in North China’." And he was so successful that his views became those of "the entire body of respectable opinion–conservative as well as liberal–on the Far East." Thus "ingratiating pseudo-Marxist platitudes became the stock-in-trade of all the ‘experts’," a modern trahison des clercs.

Perhaps, however, the most succinct statement about Lattimore came once again from Sidney Hook. Writing to a critical correspondent, Hook pointed to what he called the "opinionated ignorance" of those abroad who believed that Lattimore was "a well-meaning liberal martyrized by McCarthy for telling unpalatable truths about Asia." The fact, to the contrary, was that Lattimore "at the very least, was a devious and skillful follower of the Communist Party line on Asian affairs." Moreover, Lattimore had hardly suffered as a result of his so-called ordeal. "Allegedly hunted as a witch," Hook wrote, he was "secure in his job, published a best-seller, and still exercises a professional influence. . .greater than all anti-Communists combined."

Even Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. found it hard to defend the embattled Asia scholar. Schlesinger opposed the indictment of Lattimore for perjury, made on grounds that he had not told the truth when he denied remembering visits with a Soviet diplomat years earlier, to which he had testified before the McCarran Committee. Schlesinger made it clear that he thought the prosecution to be "outrageous." But that did not mean, Schlesinger wrote to Thurman Arnold, that he had to regard Lattimore "as a great liberal with a consistent anti-totalitarian record." Like Kristol and Hook, Schlesinger pointed to Lattimore’s now-famous endorsement of the Moscow purge trials written in 1938, in which he notes that Lattimore "defends every item of Stalinist justice." While Lattimore wrote that the Moscow Trials "sounds to me like democracy," Schlesinger concluded that his words "sound to me like fellow-traveling." And like Mrs. Trilling, Schlesinger urged the eminent judge to read Irving Kristol’s article on Lattimore. Moreover, the few anti-Communist statements he found in Lattimore’s book, Ordeal by Slander, were "a pathetic list." In fact, he found from reading Lattimore’s book that he really "was opposed to fascism but was not opposed to Communism." To Schlesinger, there was a simple dividing line: "I have never seen any reason to admire men who," he explained, "under the pretense of liberalism, continued to justify and whitewash the realities of Soviet Communism."

There were, of course, differences among these intellectuals. The central issue was the exact nature of the threat posed by Communism to American democracy. Many of the liberal anti-Communists broke with the hard right over the issue of McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade. When James Burnham argued that McCarthyism was a non-existent invention of Communists, and that the Senator had to be backed, the New York intellectuals struck back. Answering Burnham’s endorsement of McCarthy in the pages of their journal Partisan Review, William Phillips and Philip Rahv argued "anti-Communism is strengthened rather than weakened by outright opposition to McCarthy and his methods." And when Max Eastman unabashedly defended McCarthy at an April 1952 forum, Richard Rovere, Dwight Macdonald, and Mary McCarthy demanded that the American Committee for Cultural Freedom take a vigorous stand against Joe McCarthy. The problem, Rovere wrote Schlesinger, was that they had to make it apparent that their anti-Communism was "of a different sort entirely from McCarthy’s," and show that "American anti-Communism is not the blind, stupid, selfish thing" that was being portrayed. Rovere was concerned that Communist fellow travelers would make capital out of Eastman’s pro-McCarthy position, and use it to brand all of them indiscriminately as McCarthyites. Moreover, Rovere was certain that Eastman did not "give a damn about cultural freedom." In response, Sidney Hook, who had been sent a copy of the letter to Schlesinger, assured Rovere that "I have found no one who agrees with Eastman’s position" and that he was pleased that Rovere, Mary McCarthy, and Elmer Rice had attacked "what you call McCarthyism and what I call cultural vigilantism." Indeed, Hook stressed "Eastman irresponsibly defended McCarthy by name to the overwhelming disapproval of the audience, including almost all of our members present." Hook did note that some in his group did believe that McCarthyism was not as dangerous as Communism, but, he wrote, "surely it is permissible to entertain different ideas about the relative degrees of danger involved in each while being firmly opposed to both."

In reality, the issue that divided anti-Communist liberal intellectuals like Sidney Hook, Diana Trilling, and Leslie Fiedler from those like Rovere and Schlesinger, was the issue of how precisely to deal with American Communism. It was, as Hook put it, "not an easy problem." Although Rovere objected to Irving Kristol’s analysis, in some ways he made very similar points. In 1952, The Nation, a magazine identified with the Popular Front during the war and with pro-Soviet policies in the early Cold War, had published a special issue they called "How Free is Free?" in which its editors itemized the ways they thought American society had succumbed to fear. Writing in the socialist New Leader, Rovere objected to the journal’s "spurious brand of anti-McCarthyism," even though he thought some of the contributors had made valid arguments. But a special issue gave the impression that American democracy itself was in a weak state, and would work "to encourage the world to accept Radio Moscow’s view of the United States" as a "disintegrating democracy" in which hooligan McCarthyites held power. As for McCarthy, Rovere emphasized that even he was only after Communists. He had not heard him "protesting that there are 205 liberals in the State Department, as I am sure there are." What was needed was a sound loyalty program that would successfully "distinguish between liberals and Communists." Accompanying the article was a sidebar prepared by the editors, which showed in detail how many contributors to The Nation special issue were affiliated with Communist fronts.

What, then, did the intellectuals believe was the proper way to deal with the actual threat to American democracy posed by members of the Communist Party? The most controversial differences took place over how to deal with Communists who were members of the academic community. Hook firmly believed, as he reiterated over and over, that proven membership in the Communist Party was alone sufficient grounds on which to remove an individual from his teaching job. In his eyes, any true Communist believed and acted upon Party instructions to use the classroom for proselytizing, and for introducing Marxist-Leninist interpretations as truths to be learned. To Hook, it was the burden of the Communist teacher to prove that even though he was a member of the Party, he did not obey its program or let it interfere with his role in the classroom. Schlesinger argued, contrary to Hook, that performance in the classroom could alone be the standard on which to judge an individual’s capabilities and suitability for employment, and not his beliefs.

When it came to the issue of Communists working in the Federal Government, however, there was unanimity. The liberal editor and journalist James A. Wechsler stated the issue most clearly years before McCarthy came on the scene. Writing in Harper’s, Wechsler pointed out that Communists were not members of a regular political party, but rather were "organized instruments of Russian espionage." They had a right to express their ideas, but that was quite different than asserting they had an intrinsic right to a government job. Almost predicting the rise of someone like McCarthy, Wechsler wrote: "If liberals cannot face the reality of Communist intrigue as they once recognized the scope of the fascist fifth column, the Congressional cops will run the show." Liberals had to purge the Communists first, or a "witch-hunt may truly be upon us." Ironically, years later, it was Wechsler himself who became a major target of McCarthy, who tried through a brutal interrogation of the anti-Communist editor to paint him as a secret Communist.

Wechsler’s arguments were reinforced the same week in a parallel article penned by Schlesinger. The historian acknowledged that the right was using the cry of Communism to silence legitimate critics of the American political system. Nevertheless, he also stressed that American Communists were servants of the Soviet expansionist system, and that the Communist Party was "a unique means of getting, recruiting and testing potential agents," a point that has been verified most recently by the Venona revelations.

For that reason, Schlesinger wrote that the government had a right to discharge potential security risks "in advance of an overt act." The problem for Schlesinger was the institution of such standards. The State Department had denied discharged employees the right to a hearing, and was verging on what he called "the realm of persecution." That meant the necessity of fair standards. Like Kristol in 1952, Schlesinger insisted upon the need to distinguish between liberals and Communists. "Liberals who complain when Parnell Thomas fails to distinguish between liberals and Communists," he wrote, "should remember that too often they have failed to make that distinction themselves."

It was this distinction that the anti-Communist liberal intellectuals insisted upon from the start. A former editor of The Nation magazine, who did not go along with that journal’s Popular Front position, tried hard to spell out the necessary distinction. Wishing not to deny "or belittle the inroads being made by the McCarthys on the constitutional liberties of Americans," such as state loyalty oaths for teachers, journalist Robert Bendiner wrote, did not mean "a whole apparatus of informers, secret police and terrorism had been imposed on the country." What liberals ignored at their own peril was the actual nature of the American Communist Party:

After years of ridiculing every serious contention that the Communist party was. . .a conscious and active political conspiracy; of minimizing its capacity for mischief and insisting that it was merely another political party. . . .These liberal victims of self-delusion find it hard to face that evidence that in addition to Red-baiters there are also Reds.

America’s severe problems, Bendiner stressed, did not have their origins in democracy, nor were they created by the Joe McCarthys and Pat McCarrans of the world. It was "Russian-fomented conflict" that allowed "a McCarthy to exploit the very real fears and resentments of a people who only want to be left in peace." To Bendiner, McCarthyism was a reflection "of the international position that has been forced upon us by Soviet aggression." The implication was clear: Had liberals done their part in dealing with Stalinism, nothing would have been left for demagogues to exploit. There was, as Bendiner argued, a very real threat from abroad. And to deal with that threat, it was the responsibility of liberals not only to jettison the Popular Front, but also to join with conservatives with whom they differed to isolate the pro-Communist Left, "no matter how much aid and comfort that might give the McCarthys of the country." One could not simply cry "hysteria" every time a Communist was exposed, "on the ground that his political beliefs are private." Civil liberties were the cry of fellow travelers who sought to hide their true agenda behind the facade of repression.

Irving Kristol, however, developed what was the sharpest and most controversial of the positions on McCarthy taken by any liberal anti-Communist. Assessing the damage done by Joe McCarthy for Commentary, Kristol agreed that McCarthy was nothing but a "vulgar demagogue." But for all his faults, Kristol wrote, he had one important positive virtue: "For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing, and with some justification." Kristol’s emphasis was not on McCarthy, whom he correctly assumed all his compatriots were opposed. Rather, it was on the inability of many liberals to reflect accurately about the danger of domestic Communism.

Thus Kristol counted on his list of weak-minded liberals such famous personalities as the journalist Alan Barth of the Washington Post, the historian Henry Steele Commager, the legal scholar Zechariah Chafee, the writer Howard Mumford Jones, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and FDR’s former Attorney General, Frances Biddle. These men, part of a generation of "earnest reformers who helped give this country a New Deal," Kristol explained, were all "stained with the guilt of having lent aid and comfort to Stalinist tyranny." When men like these stooped to defending an Owen Lattimore and his pro-Communist record, they played McCarthy’s game, "but on the losing side." Similarly, Kristol pointed out that when Commager attacked McCarthy or the House Committee on Un-American Activities for investigating the Communist front National Lawyers Guild, without first trying to find out if in fact it was a Communist front, it was simply irresponsible. Had he done so, he would have found that the Red-hunters of the HCUA were in fact right, revealing these "fronts for what they are." Moreover, Kristol asserted that liberals should not attack the FBI for sending in undercover agents into the Communist Party. When Alan Barth claimed that such covert action was an interference with the right to privacy, he had only shifted the blame "from the Communist conspirators to the FBI agents who identified them."

Kristol’s logic applied to loyalty oaths as well. Liberals should oppose them as ineffective, he argued, since a Communist would willingly lie and sign them, while an honest civil libertarian might refuse and then be fired unjustly as a Communist. What Kristol was saying was that liberals had to discriminate between their real achievements and their sins, or allow McCarthy and his ilk to make it appear that the liberals’ achievements were their sins. Joining the effort to uproot Communism was not a bad policy, and would not contribute to a climate of fear. As for Communists losing their jobs after refusing to answer the questions put to them by Red-hunting members of Congress, Kristol retorted that he had no pity for any liberal who wailed that Communists were "in danger of being excluded from well-paying jobs!" One could not forget that Communism was not just another idea, but was rather a "conspiracy to subvert every social and political order it does not dominate." To tolerate Communists was thus to tolerate a conspiracy against the democratic polity. As Irving Kristol summed up: "So long as liberals agree with Senator McCarthy that the fate of communism involves the fate of liberalism and that we must choose between complete civil liberties for everyone and a disregard for civil liberties entirely, we shall make no progress except to chaos." As for the defense of the rights of Communists to speak, Kristol had no objection, as long as liberals spoke as "one of us defending their liberties," lest they be "taken as speaking as one of them."

The response to Irving Kristol’s article revealed the extent of the differences fellow anti-Communist liberals had with him. Rovere differed greatly with Kristol’s tough essay. He agreed that some liberals accorded Communists a sympathy they did not deserve. But Rovere argued that Kristol was using the same logic as the naive fellow-traveling liberals. These types tolerated Communists because the Reds spoke as men of the left, used much the same language as the liberals, and gained sympathy because Joe McCarthy treated them as brutally as he did actual Communists. But while they tolerated Communists simply because they were McCarthy’s victims, Rovere accused Kristol of tolerating McCarthy because he too was opposed to Communists. Kristol, he argued, was covering up for McCarthy "just as Mr. Barth and Professor Commager sometimes cover up for Communists." Yet, Rovere too made it clear that he realized stern measures had to be taken to deal with the real danger of America’s domestic Communists. While he was opposed to loyalty oaths and "scoundrels like McCarthy," Rovere backed the provisions of the McCarran Internal Security Act, "which calls for the internment of all Communists known to the FBI immediately upon the outbreak of war," as "sound and necessary." Others compared the measure to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. But Rovere pointed out that the wartime camps were based on the "illogic of race," while this internment was to be based on "the logic of politics," and it would meet the test of a "clear and present danger." Similarly, Rovere supported the prosecution of Communists under the terms of the Smith Act, which he saw as addressing Party members as conspirators and which did not "involve civil liberties in any important way." FBI agents had provided the evidence by which they had been convicted, he noted, and those found guilty were not "denied their rights." In a similar fashion, Rovere praised Alger Hiss’s conviction as a "triumph of due process" as well as a triumph for the HCUA. If that committee had always abided by its procedures in the Hiss inquiry, he wrote, "no one could raise any reasonable objection to it."

And like his colleague Schlesinger, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) chairman Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., one of the most prominent Washington, D.C. liberals, expressed his disappointment that Kristol did not understand that authentic liberals were already "anti-Communist enough." Rauh noted that the ADA excluded Communists from its ranks at the start, and in 1948 it led "the successful drive to expose and deflate the Progressive Party as an arm of Soviet foreign policy." But Rauh still defended the decision of some liberals to work with Communists during the wartime Popular Front. Communists, he argued, had taken part on the terms set by liberals, and were forced to pay lip service to liberal–and not Communist–ideals. Kristol, however, found support from the Socialist Party’s leader, Norman Thomas, who praised Kristol for understanding what real civil liberties were about. In his own book, published two years later, Thomas agreed that it was "a serious liberal error, contributing to the rise of McCarthyism, that so many liberals so long minimized the Communist evil." Like Kristol, Thomas believed that it was Communism "that occasioned the rise of McCarthyism." He chastised liberals for thinking that because "McCarthyism is bad on the whole, therefore none of its elements are necessary or even defensible." And like Sidney Hook, he believed that Communists had no right to teach, since they had abandoned "their freedom to serve truth," and were members of an "external conspiratorial authority." As for McCarthy, Thomas saw through the Senator’s game. He made "noisy, indiscriminate criticism of communism" and named Communists he could not identify. His tactics only helped the Communists, giving them respectability by allowing them to confuse themselves "with decent dissenters."

Aside from the obvious fellow travelers and pro-Communists, opposition to the analysis of the liberal anti-Communists came from those to their left who had begun their political life in the small Trotskyist community. One of the first to espouse anti-anti-Communism was the young socialist, Michael Harrington. Looking at the position taken by the members of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, Harrington was aghast at the logic used by many whom he regarded as political comrades. Harrington saw their arguments as part of a "systematic, explicit effort to minimize the threat to civil liberties." Moreover, their drive against civil liberties was being carried out in the name of anti-Stalinism. In particular, Harrington condemned his mentor Norman Thomas’s support of the charges made against Owen Lattimore as "sad–indeed, humiliating." That Thomas, Harrington wrote, "identified in American eyes with the cause of socialism, should have let himself be put in the position of defending" Senator Pat McCarran’s charges revealed to him something about "the debacle of American radicalism and liberal politics in general." Like Popular Front liberals, it seemed, Harrington too seemed unable to make the distinction between liberals and Communists that Hook, Diana Trilling, Schlesinger, and Rovere demanded.

Further to the left, Irving Howe, the literary critic and once a revolutionary Trotskyist, had started his own magazine, Dissent, as a medium from which to reassert the values of democratic socialism, as well as to distinguish himself and his comrades from the anti-Communist liberals and socialists like Sidney Hook. Thus Howe referred to the "willfulness of those who see only terror and the indifference of those who see only health," and demanded acceptance of his belief that "intellectual freedom. . .is under severe attack and the intellectuals have. . .shown a painful lack of militancy in defending the rights" of those accused by the McCarthyites. Howe, for the first time, condemned Commentary in particular for trying to adapt liberalism to the status quo, and sarcastically commented that "the magazine was more deeply preoccupied. . . with the dangers to freedom stemming from people like Freda Kirchwey [editor of The Nation] and Arthur Miller than the dangers from people like Senator McCarthy."

At stake, the historian Mary S. McAuliffe has written, were two very different views of the world. To the liberals of The Nation, she commented, "the United States was in the grips of hysteria, and it defined the hysterical as those who so feared the threat of Communism that they responded by subverting basic civil liberties in their hunt for Communists." To the anti-Communist liberals of the New Leader, and one would have to add those associated with both Commentary and Partisan Review,

hysteria was rampant and dangerous, but. . .the international and domestic Communist menace was real, and those alert to its threat were realistic. Those who thought that McCarthy commanded any real power and had committed any real damage were the ones who were hysterical. . . .[They] emphatically did not approve of McCarthy, but. . .concluded that McCarthyism had not permeated American society and that McCarthy posed no real threat to American liberties. The real danger. . .was from creeping Communism, not creeping McCarthyism.

It is true that despite their differences, the anti-Communist liberals unanimously held one assumption. They all argued that one could maintain a commitment to civil liberties and at the same time oppose participation with Communists in joint efforts, and therefore could and should exclude them from membership in liberal organizations. It was not McCarthyism when the ADA charter excluded Communists from membership, or when the American Civil Liberties Union expelled the Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from its board. Similarly, they held, with great merit, that it was not a violation of civil liberties to point out that Communists had no right to a government job. As Hook stressed over and over again, Communists had a right to express their ideas, and to have them debated in the public marketplace. It was not their ideas they favored banning, but their demands for jobs through which they could subvert America’s national security, which was quite a different thing.

Throughout their writing, the anti-Communist liberals and socialists grappled with tough questions at a volatile moment in our nation’s recent past. Trying to steer a careful middle ground between acquiescence to demagoguery and the violation of civil liberties on the one hand, and softness towards totalitarianism and Communism on the other, their position was found to be unsatisfactory by those on both the hard left and far right. As the years passed–and McCarthyism has become a study of the past rather than, thankfully, a phenomenon of the present–the tough-minded arguments and debates held by the intellectual community have become subject of a pervasive and ever growing myth. Its members have been accused of either being subservient to McCarthyism, of having failed to protest it sufficiently, or even of paving the ground for Joe McCarthy himself, and finally, of helping his anti-Communist crusade once he arrived on the scene. The evidence about their views, obtained easily from reading their dialogues and debates in various publications, belies all of these assertions. It makes it clear that while as a group they had various differences on certain issues, they were all clear about two things above all else: they despised McCarthy and considered him to be a demagogue and a thug. They also knew that the stark reality of a dangerous international Communist movement, along with its American counterpart, posed a real imminent and serious threat to American democracy. They demanded that liberals not abandon dealing with how to confront that threat, lest they relinquish that task to McCarthy and his kind alone. Unlike many others, they refused to be fooled into believing that anyone attacked by McCarthy, McCarran, or the House Committee on Un-American Activities was a noble and innocent martyred liberal.

So many decades later, it is time to set the record straight, and to rescue the thought and the effort these intellectuals made in a dark and troubled time. Not everything they wrote was correct; some of their observations and bromides were way off base. But as a group, they avoided the trap Joe McCarthy had tried to set for them–that of getting them to defend the innocence of actual Communists because he had targeted liberals among his enemies. Now that the legitimacy of their opposition to Communism has been affirmed by historical events, it is time to stop confusing their anti-Communism with support of McCarthyism.