PARTISAN REVIEW
49
idealism, and Americanism, so characteristic of the Popular Front
period (with its stress on Communism as "twentieth-century
Americanism"), they could only read as proof of mendacity,
though it's familiar enough to anyone who grew up with an uncle
in the Party or a parent in a CIO union.
For Fiedler and Warshow the vulgar middlebrow Jew is a
cultural embarrassment who must be exorcised, so that the high–
brow critic can confirm his place in the kingdom of art. The
Jewish radical, the quaint Popular Front "progressive," will be
sacrificed so that the children of immigrants, the despised intellec–
tuals with their foreign ideas, can become full-fledged Americans.
Years earlier Warshow himself had criticized a novel by
Lionel Trilling for its failure to portray the "deep psychological
drives" involved in the Stalinist experience and its aftermath, and
for suppressing the dominant Jewish involvement in the radical
politics of the thirties. That was in 1947. By 1953 when the
Rosenbergs were finally killed that Jewish element had been
trumpeted for years in the world's headlines. The deep psychologi–
cal drives of a Warshow or a Fiedler are as understandable, how–
ever unforgivable, as the quiet terror of many ordinary Jews that a
pogrom was in the works (despite the thoughtfulness of the
courts in providing the Rosenbergs with a Jewish judge and Jewish
prosecutors). What was buried with the Rosenbergs, a few months
after Eisenhower took office, was two decades of American (and
Jewish) Marxism, and two centuries of a different innocence from
the kind Fiedler attacks: the innocence of a nation convinced it
could play the world's good citizen and moral arbiter. "Watch
out!" wrote Sartre the day after the executions. "America has the
rabies!"
If
the substance of idealism was shattered, however, the
rhetoric and its illusions lived on to fight another day.
It
took the
Vietnam war to expose the emperor's clothes and shake his righ–
teous self-assurance.
V.
I have put such emphasis on the Rosenberg case I;>ecause of
its magnitude but also because by the early fifties the Jew was well
on his way to becoming the American Everyman, as the black
would be in the early sixties. In the wake of the Holocaust the fate
of the Jew, to many, had become a parable of the human condi-
