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peared on the American political scene during Roosevelt's administration.
Wilson had been a scholar and a gentleman; Teddy Roosevelt had been a
person of good birth. But neither of them had the unmistakable marks of
breeding, the amenity and grace, of Franklin Roosevelt, and neither had
been able to bring his own kind into politics with him in any number
worth notice. Before the Roosevelt era, politicians were a raffish com–
pany. Even at their best they must be condescended to by people of cul–
tivated mind and habit. But when Roosevelt came into office, this
changed overnight.
From his start in office and increasingly as the years went on,
Roosevelt attracted to government men and women for whom, in an
earlier day, the political life would have been unworthy-men and
women whose professional competence had been established in fields
far removed from politics and whose private ambitions were subordinate
to a precise, conscious morality. Of this new kind of political man Hiss
can be described as almost a prototype, in quality if not chronologically.
Serious, alert, well-educated, eager, sensitive, charming, he perfectly
expressed this new government of mind and spirit which had replaced
the government of patronage and crude personal advantage. His career
was a career of energetic devotion to principle ; his times were times of
strenuous effort on behalf of high social goals. His personality was ex–
actly cut to the mold of his career and his times.
If
we can say, as I think we can, that before this century the
source of all political idealism was (however remotely) religion, I think
we can also say that in our own century the source of all political
idealism has been socialism, and, since the Russian Revolution, specifical–
ly the socialism of the Soviet Union. I do not mean that whoever has
worked for political progress has necessarily been a socialist. I mean
only that it has been from socialist theory that political progress has
chiefly taken its inspiration, and from socialist example its practice.
On all progressive citizens of this country, the treatment of Russia by
the democracies at the time of the Revolution and in the decade which
followed had left a large impress of guilt. For h ere was an actual ex–
periment in-well, not socialism perhaps, but Communism (the dif–
ference was to be regarded as one of degree) and look how shamefully
we had treated it! Roosevelt's recognition of the Soviet Union was an in–
vitation for all those who felt this guilt to rally around him. And his do–
mestic policies-his bold incursions upon big business, his courageous
stand on behalf of labor, his fearless understanding that the modern econ–
omy had carried us past the day when laissez-faire could be considered a
governmental virtue-signalled an administration unafraid to move to-
