THE POET ON CAPITOL HILL
13
Yet five years after Mr. MacLeish wrote these grim words, he
stood as Chairman of the 1937 National Congress of American
Writers, an organization now frankly recognized as dominated by
Sta~inist
influence to a degree that has, since the Hitler-Stalin pact
of 1939, forced most of its officers, from Thomas Mann down, to
resign in protest against Russian and Communist Party pressure.
He called on the assembled writers (including poets) to recognize
in "the rise of fascist powers and the success of fascist aggression"
a matter of the most pressing concern. Far from celebrating the
virtues of poetic detachment in such a crisis, or strictly forbidding
his poetic members to mix in maneuvers, or telling them that there
was nothing worse for their trade than to be in style, or questioning
the justice of bearing arms, he roundly denounced "the hypocrites
and the cynical and the frivolous who do not wish to understand
what is happening in Spain." He flayed all liberal and skeptical
minds who use arguments about personal integrity "to attack the
intelligence, if not actually the integrity, of those who, not them–
selves Communists, stand as the Communists stand in active opposi–
tion to the fascist attack":
They imply that those who find themselves in this position
are being "used'' and that they are dupes and stooges.... One
would have thought that they [the liberals] would more natu–
rally think of themselves as the users, as the leaders in this fight,
as the responsible men.... To my mind there is something un–
pleasantly squeamish and virginal about this fear of being used,
this phobia of being maneuvered-something almost indecently
coy. The danger of rape has always existed in the world, but only
the tenderest spirits let it keep them in at night.
27
•
He rallied his listeners to make war against the fascist
threat~
"Those who fight
ag~inst
fascism are not fomenting war for the
simple reason that the war is already fomented. The war is already
made. Not a preliminary war. Not a local conflict.
The
war; the
actual war.... Spain is no political allegory."
28
The Writers Con–
gress gave Mr. MacLeish an opportunity for his first full-dress.
rehearsal in the role which he has been playing more recently in
Washington. There he was already seizing upon the crisis of the
hour as an excuse from enquiring into causes that brought fascism
into the post-War world, or into the worth of those "statements of
conviction, of purpose, and of belief on which the war of 1914-18
