THE
HISS CASE
489
acerbity of criticism of the status quo but beautifully assimilated to
practical activity. Just as his good manners were a reminder that de–
portment can go along with intelligence, so his fine career was a reas–
surance that idealism can be made a worldly success.
It
W<l3
also a reassurance that history was on the side of political
idealism and that liberalism need no longer be merely an cl1l'-lattled
sentimeut. For a long time before the Roosevelt era the political
idealist had been a very lonely man, with small hODe of finding any
community with government, and certainly no hope of being able to
shape policy. Now, in the Roosevelt years, this was changing. Govern–
ment had raised the intellectual minority out of its isolation and placed
it at the very center of power.
That, even in these circumstances, the intellectual liberal minority
still needed even more reassurance than history was giving it; that it
still conceived itself as an ineffectual little group buffeted about by the
reactionary hordes; that it persisted in thinking itself lonely even while
its ranks swelled, and isolated even while it stood at the apex of public
life-this is one of the salient features of its psychology. Once un–
popular, always unpopular; once weak, always weak-such is the in–
forming feeling of modern liberalism, a feeling which has outlasted
even the Roosevelt years. And it derives, I think, from the identifica–
tion liberalism has made with Communism. The friends of the Soviet
Union can watch it grow from one-sixth of the earth's surface to one–
fifth
to
one-third and still persuade themselves that Russia is in as
much need of protection as she was in the early days of the Revolution.
Just so, even at the height of the Roosevelt era, when liberalism had
achieved a hitherto unimagined power, it lived, not by the reality of
its strength, but by the conviction of its frailty.
What forged or cemented the bond between liberalism and Com–
munism, rationalizing this sentiment of liberalism's weakness was, of
course, the threat of fascism. The economic depression had given a ter–
rific jolt to liberal complacency and freshly thrust upon the intellectuals
of this country the fact of the class structure of our economy; but it
made revolutionaries only of those middle-class intellectuals sufficiently
imaginative to make a very long-range association of their own
fates and that of the proletariat. The middle-class liberal suffered a cer–
tain amount of personal strain in the depression but he was not really
damaged to the point where the Soviet system presented itself to him
as a fierce necessity.
If
he would make a revolution it would be for the
immediate sake only of the working-class, not for his own imminent ad–
vantage or protection.
It
was Hitler's rise that swung the full tide
