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PARTISAN REVIEW
Pacific School of Religion, addressed himself to the subject of the
"Intelligentsia
in
Defeat."
For the Rev. Dr. Fitch, the election marked, above
all,
the long–
awaited punishment of the American intelligentsia. In Governor
Stevenson he saw "the perfect incarnation of the liberal logos." The
Democratic candidate, in Dr. Fitch's view, was characterized by
his
passion for truth; and, while Dr. Fitch made clear that he had
nothing against truth, "more vulgar politics might argue that the
real objective is not truth but right action; and that, while it should
be an ingredient in all right action, truth must mingle with other
necessities that determine a course of conduct."
It was no doubt this theory of the limited role of truth
in
politics which would permit Dr. Fitch to spread his ecclesiastical
mantle over Senator McCarthy. The one issue which really con–
cerned the intelligentsia, Dr. Fitch continued, was civil liberties,
which, he added disagreeably, was their class issue-much presum–
ably as the wool tariff would be the class issue for the owners of
sheep. "With this lofty passion," Dr. Fitch said, in an appropriate
vain of sarcasm, "the intelligentsia recognized only one real incarnate
devil in the campaign, and that was Senator McCarthy." But was
not Senator McCarthy, Dr. Fitch asked, really justified? It is true
that the character of the treason of the intellectuals "was not al–
together [sic] of a sort that can be recognized in a court of law."
It consisted rather "in the gross of a whole tradition of scholarship
and of philosophy which dealt in too cavalier a fashion with the
irreducible articles of the American faith," Dr. Fitch said, trailing
off in a sputter about "positivism ... nihilism ... ethical relativism."
Seen this way, Dr. Fitch declared, McCarthy was but "the spokesman
for the suspicions of inarticulate people that somehow and some–
where in their country a great betrayal was going on." (One
hardly knows how to interpret the news that the Union Theological
Seminary
has
recently engaged Dr. Fitch to take the place of Dr.
Reinhold Niebuhr during Dr. Niebuhr's current illness; Fitch pinch–
hitting for Niebuhr may show the trend of the times.)
Nor was the theory that Senator McCarthy had become the
appointed instrument of divine wrath to chastise the intellectuals
confined to such emblems of the Protestant clergy as Dr. Fitch.
Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, at a luncheon for the Senator at the Hotel
