34
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
the Left rather than the Right by associating his demagoguery
with populism and the presumed dangers of ideology;1 that Sid–
ney Hook supported the firing of supposed Communists from
schools and universities
on l£bertarian grounds,
since such centers
of independent thought had no room for those whose minds were
by definit£on
unfree; that teachers and academics everywhere
stood by quietly while some of their colleagues became unpersons;
that Elia Kazan and others went before the House Un-American
Activities Committee to beat their breasts, swear fealty, name
names, tell all -- the "all" being mainly trivial gossip many years
old, the detritus of left-wing political life of the thirties. These
episodes but skim the surface and isolate a few conspicuous
individuals, yet they tell us enough to know that our future
historian may abridge certain fine distinctions intellectuals love to
make, especially when they are in bad faith. Hindsight will not fail
to connect their opinions with certain gross actualities of the time,
including blacklists, union purges, jail terms, university firings,
McCarran and Smith Acts, supinely cooperative Supreme Court
decisions, to say nothing of a much wider range of political
intimidation that these events helped to enforce, as the range of
public policy and private opinion grew ever more narrow.
II.
The details of these Cold War episodes are hardly new and
despite their maleficence I don't wish to belabor
them~
though
I'll
soon return to some of them in greater detail. My other field of
evidence is not political but literary: the curious emergence of the
Jewish novel into a central position in American fiction. This is
not to say there was a purely Wasp hegemony over American
letters before the fifties, but earlier Jewish writers like Henry
Roth, Daniel Fuchs, and even Nathanael West did not gain sub–
stantial recognition until they were republished in the wake of the
Jewish-American renaissance of the fifties (championed by an
aggressive new generation of Jewish critics like Howe, Fiedler, and
Kazin, themselves no mean flowers of that awakening).
1.
See the essays in
The Radical Right,
edited by Daniel Bell (1955, 1963) and a critique
by Michael Paul Rogin in The
Intellectuals and McCarthy
(1967).
