THE HISS CASE
495
ward the socialist sourcc of its idcals. The middle-class Hiss need never
have been a Communist to have found in thc Roosevelt regime an excel–
lent fi eld for playing out his social guilts: therc were thousands like him.
Nor need he, any more than Roosevelt himself, have been a Communist,
or even a socialist, to have bcen in favor of domestic changes which, al–
though moving in the general socialist direction, yet so soundly met the
requirements of this stage in our economic evolution that no party
which would win or stay in office now dare retreat from them.
It was absurd to think of Roosevelt as a Communist, and it still
is. Or even as a socialist. Only those who were opposed to any form
of social progress could call Roosevelt a Red. But he did not mind
being called a R ed-and precisely here lay both his strength and his
weakness.
It
was Roosevelt's great strength that, truly liberal in
hi :;
political goals, he refused to be in timidated by the bad names by which
reactionaries might call him.
It
was his great weakness that he took
the word "Red" only at its cant value, and refused to see the reality of
the R ed threat and its menace to democracy. This strength and this
weakness, both, the liberals who followed him into office shared with
him.
I have spoken of the impact of European fascism on the American
liberal. But the possibility of fascism was not limited to Europe, it
could also h appen here. In fact, it was alrcady h appening here : the
reactionaries who labelled every progressive measure of Roosevelt's as
the insidious work of Bolshevism were its vanguard. Anyone of firm
liberal intention must refu se to be frightened by them, must be only flat–
tered to
be
thought their enemy. And if, in the interests of progress, one
found oneself-as, for instance, Mrs. Roosevelt did so frequently-on
the same side on certain issues with avowed Communists, it was an
association to be borne with equanimity, for only in the darkened mind
of reaction was Communism a danger. One was inviolable in one's anti–
fascist democratic Americanism.
Much has been said, by those who think Hiss innocent, about the
patent contradiction between his impeccable public life and the nefarious
private activities of which he has been convicted. It has been felt
that for him to be guilty as accused he would have had to be a Jekyll–
and-Hyde personality, never letting his right hand know wha t his left
was doing. But leave the espionage out of account for the moment, and
consider Hiss only as an undercover Communist.
If
we examine the
ideological atmosphere in which he conducted his public life, how
much actual contradiction was there between his public and his private
commitments? How much intellectual acrobatics did it take for a secret
