THE HIGHBROW IN POLITICS
163
In the '20s, this situation was manageable. The social pressures
were heavy, but escape was easy. Satire was an available weapon:
Mencken, Lewis, Lardner and their imitators could cope with society
by
ridiculing it. Or, if this form of intellectual escape was unsatis–
fying, then physical escape was easily possible, and a literary gener–
ation fled to Paris. And, in any case, there was an abundance of
outlets; it was possible for persons with modest sums of money to
start
new publications and, in one way or another, gain circulation
for even the most vapid and eccentric writing.
In the generation since, the horizon has closed in. The cold war
and the Soviet threat have necessarily narrowed alternatives; and
the indulgence of freedom must inevitably take second place in the
real
world to the harsh requirements of survival. And the intellectuals
themselves, in many cases, have forfeited sympathy or respect because
of the arrogance and egotism they displayed when they were riding
high-an arrogance too often accompanied by political imbecility,
if
not by political guilt. Yet the demagogues of the right, trying to
pluck power out of anxiety, have narrowed the alternatives far beyond
the point of necessity. And, though the intellectuals may have de–
served much in the way of correction, they did not deserve as the
instrument of chastisement a blatant liar whose own awakening to
the Communist threat was delayed until February 9, 1950-a date
by
which time all but the most obtuse intellectuals had long since
tumbled to the facts of life.
The new atmosphere is no longer conducive to the old escapes.
To satirize the American businessman today, for example, is to invite
suspicion and attack; what was once satiric is now (in the business
community, at least) subversive. When Robert
E.
Sherwood pre–
sented the not unfamiliar dramatic type of the hardfisted local banker
in
The Best Years of Our Lives,
he was attacked as providing pro–
paganda for the Communists. James Thurber said last summer that
it
would no longer be possible to write a satiric comedy so "free and
exuberant" as
The Male A
nimal.
And he is clearly right: the busi–
nessman who was the comic trustee in 1940 would be the university
pmident today, and hardly a fit subject for humor. The most
brilliant and daring of our comic strip cartoonists, Al Capp, finally
had to marry off his two leading characters, because, no longer
feeling
himself
free to "kid hell out of everything," he felt he had
