52
PARTISAN REVIEW
their suburban houses-will be shot like cattle, or driven to die more
slowly and terribly in some Arctic or tropical wasteland. Mass rape
may be possible, and recorded, in Berlin-Zehlendorf, but it is not
even conceivable in Greenwich. Can the President of General Motors
or U. S. Steel or the Chase National Bank, with whom an ordinary
fellow-citizen cannot even make an appointment, be yanked from
his
chair by a common ruffian who has not even been announced?
It is too absurd. The businessmen, for all their rhetoric, can think of
the communists only as rivals or competitors of the same fundamental
type as themselves. And every businessman knows that all businessmen
have, in the last analysis, their price; that, no matter how hard the
bargaining, it is always possible to make a deal if you want it badly
enough.
Very many businessmen do not know the difference between
a communist and an anarchist, democratic socialist, or mere eccentric
dissident. They pick up a pompous phrase like "socialism is the half–
way house to communism," and imagine that by repeating it they
are being profoundly philosophical. I have had Minnesota business–
men tell me that Senator Humphrey-who drove the communists out
of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party in Minnesota-is a commu–
nist. Not a few Michigan businessmen look on the Reuther brothers as
communist. I have even heard John
L.
Lewis called "a communist at
heart." The social-democratic labor governments of Britain, Australia
and Finland, all three of which in 1949 smashed major communist
internal offensives (the London Dock strike, the Australian coal strike,
the Finnish lumber and attempted general strike), are all "sort of
communist" in many Rotary and Chamber of Commerce circles.
Many businessmen have asked me about my colleague, Sidney Hook,
one of the world's leading anti-communists, and also a democratic
socialist and "radical": "He is a communist, isn't he?"
In the struggle against internal communism, these negative
qualities of the American businessmen are discouragingly apparent.
Some of the businessmen, plain and simple reactionaries, are abso–
lutely anti-union. They would like literally to smash the trade unions.
Since their likes become known, they too help to "alienate the prole–
tariat" and to heap up grist for the communist propaganda mill. How
modern mass industry could operate without trade unions they have
never stopped to speculate. Others, from ignorance or greed or both,
