PARTISAN REVIEW
believe that Granville Hicks
in
Where We Came Out
presents a
reasonably just picture of the actual extent of Communist influence
in the '30s-an influence much less than is now often supposed even
among intellectuals; indeed, his picture does not take sufficient ac–
count of the infinitesimal extent of Party effectiveness outside the
major seaboard cities. The New Dealers, as we have already said,
were even less affected than the intellectuals, but they shared with
the latter some personal and journalistic ties; this, plus some dramatic
cases like those of Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss and the be–
lated fellow-traveling of Henry Wallace, made it politically possible–
though fantastic-to damn the New Deal as a Communist-front or–
ganization. This has created a situation obviously quite different from
that of earlier decades, when though liberal intellectuals and New
Dealers were also called Communists, they only became as a result
firmer and angrier. Today such libel is not only a disaster for public
relations but cause for an anxious inner scrutiny. For as it becomes
clear that few of the causes liberals have espoused have been im–
mune to exploitation by the Communists, the liberal intellectuals lose
their former sure conviction about their causes and are put, inside
as well as out, on the defensive. One evidence of this is the strategy
of continuous balancing so many of us engage in: if one day we
defend Negroes (one of the few causes which, though taken up by
Communists, still gets relatively unambiguous attention from intel–
lectuals), then the next day we set the record straight by calling for
more aid to Indo-China-not, let us repeat, merely for protective
coloration but to make clear to ourselves that we are not fools or
dupes of fellow-traveler rhetoric.
In the midst of these perplexities, the liberal intellectuals have
discovered that, thanks to the mediators of the mass media, they must
today contend with the fact that their ideas, even where relevant to
contemporary discontent, are quickly taken over and transmuted into
the common stock of middlebrow conceptions; they can no longer
control, even by intentional opacity, the pace of distribution. Thus,
what they produce soon becomes dissociated from them and their
immediate coteries, no longer needs them [or distribution and transla–
tion, and this leaves them, even when they may reach a wider audi–
ence with more dispatch than ever before in history, with a feeling
of impotence and isolation. In other words, the intellectuals whose
