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tive victory for them, the proof they were right in their repeated warn–
ings against Communist infiltration. (I am speaking here, obviously,
not of the reactionary section of anti-Hiss opinion but of the anti-Com–
munist liberals who believe Hiss guilty.) It is not that they are un–
concerned with the future, but that they invoke it less frequently than
they do the past, and less frequently than they do experience-experience
of Communism's methods and goals. But in this very fact that they are
so much turned to the past lies the source of their superior conscious–
ness. Most anti-Communist liberals have been through the Communist
mill, or frighteningly close to it-which has given them a first-hand
knowledge of the Communist technique, personnel and idiom; also
of the way political partisanship can blind one to glaring political fact.
To
be
a decent person and to have had proof, in one's own political
past, of one's power for self-deception is to be forever charged to self–
awareness. It means that at least one tries to put evidence before
prejudice.
But however much more reliable the anti-Hiss side may be
in
point of weighing evidence, it has not served its country well by its
deficiencies of conscience. To hate and fear Communism, to see Hiss's
triumphant public career as the triumph of a force which seriously
threatens democracy and his downfall as a defeat of this enemy-this
is not enough conscience. Not enough, at any rate, for a liberal. Who–
ever thinks Hiss guilty but would still think of himself as a liberal has
the duty of bringing to the case his most finely tempered understanding
of its complexities.
The first demand that conscience puts on him is that he separate
himself from his undesirable allies, from those who think Hiss guilty
because they believe that anyone who is on the side of freedom and
change, of labor and internationalism, is guilty of subversion and un–
Americanism. It has always been true that politics makes strange bed–
fellows, but probably never so horribly true as in these last decades
in which Communism has not only split the liberals among themselves
but also time and again thrown the anti-Communist liberal into the
same camp with forces he detests, or should detest, as much as he
detests Communists. In the Hiss case, this enforced alignment between
anti-Communist liberals and reactionaries is particularly open and
distasteful. Who brought Hiss's perfidy to public issue, except the one
agency in Washington most suspect for its political motive, the un–
American Activities Committee? What is the anti-Hiss press, except the
usual rabble-rousers and Red-baiters? What party has most to gain from
his conviction, except the Republican Party, and the Republican Party
