Richard H.Rovere
COMMUNISTS IN A FREE SOCIETY
Alan Barth's
The Loyalty of Free Men,
a treatise on Com–
munists in a free society which first appeared in January 1951 and
is now being made available to the multitudes in a paper-backed edi–
tion/ has attained a celebrity which has little relation to its quality
as a book.
It
is generous and humane, but it does not cut very deep,
and it is at times woefully misinformed. Mr. Barth, a Washington jour–
nalist, appreciates, the threat of Soviet power as well as the next man;
his devotion to freedom is exemplary; he is widely and intelligently read
in the history of constitutional democracy. He happens, though, to
know very little about Communists, and his ignorance is accompanied,
and perhaps encouraged, by a temperament that leads him to give
the benefit of every doubt to people who profess social ideals of a
certain elevation. He is capable, for example, of discussing the resis–
tance of the Hollywood Ten to congressional investigation as if it were
an expression of a disinterested concern for civil liberties. But even
when Mr. Barth's libertarian arguments do not rest on misinforma–
tion, his powers of penetration are unimpressive, and his book is dis–
tinguished chiefly for its gallantry and its restatements of some rather
obvious propositions.
Nevertheless, it has become a highly controversial book. Liberals
of Mr. Barth's own variety-decent, intelligent people who are anti–
Communist but who lack the intimate awareness of Communist strate–
gies that is best acquired by close involvement in, or studious observa–
tion of, radical politics-have seized upon it as an expression of their
disgust with McCarthyism and have made it a kind of liberal man–
ifesto. This in turn has provoked writers who are thoroughly acquainted
with Communist strategies and who quickly perceive Mr. Barth's short–
comings to point to it as a horrible example of what they regard as
the muddled thinking of most liberals. It is used in just this way by
Irving Kristol in a recent issue of
Commentary,
and a number of other
1
Pocket Books, Inc. $.35.
