THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES
49
takes a long time learning to form an opinion about any international
matter and as long a time to change it. Thus, the WorId War II
alliance with the Soviet Union did little to alter the suspicion and dis–
trust with which the poor and uneducated regarded Russia- indeed,
all foreign countries; these people were "protected" by their fatalism,
generalized suspiciousness, and apathy from the wartime messages of
the movies, the OWl, and like agencies, so that the later worsening
of relations with the Soviet Union found the "backward" strata al–
ready holding the now fashionable opinions.
To be sure, the "backward" in America are literate; they have
radios and TV and buy newspapers; and to an Asiatic they must
appear to move with fabulous speed. Certainly, in non-political mat–
ters (where the "voter" has at hand the ready mechanism of a retail
store) fashions spread with ever faster waves, and the "backward"
buy "modem" in furniture long before they will buy it in elections.
Yet it is the educated, who read news columns and news magazines,
who have customarily been responsible for the major changes in Amer–
ican political position. For example, the shift of this group from neu–
trality
to
intervention in 1940 and 1941 allowed the Lend Lease Act to
slip through. It also supplied the cadre under Averell Harriman
which then energetically did the actual "lending."
The odd situation today, however, is that such a change does
not suffice to explain what happened between 1950 and 1952. Many
of the intelligent (i.e., college-educated) and articulate minority still
in the main are not unsympathetic to Roosevelt's and Truman's for–
eign policies. They believe that the alliances with Britain and France
must be maintained; they do not regard Communist infiltration as a
serious problem; they do regard the threat to civil liberties by Com–
munist hunters as a serious problem.
If
they do not always say so,
this is partly for protective coloration, partly because, as we shall
see, they have been put on the defensive not only strategically but also
within themselves. (There are of course others of the college-educated
who have always hated Truman and Roosevelt, largely for domestic
"that man" reasons; they are not averse to using foreign policy as
a heaven-sent means of vindication.)
As
we have seen, the shift has not been among the inarticulate–
they were there already. The decisive factors, we suggest, have been
two-fold, and interconnected. On the one hand, the opinion leaders
