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mitlee. Secret political groups, about which some of one's best friends
are kept in the dark, exact a heavy human cost.
My other regret about the communist episode in my life is more
complex and more difficult for me to analyze. I know now, of course,
that I belonged to an international organization which was responsi–
ble, in the thirties and later, for horrenduous crimes. The fact that I
knew nothing of these crimes is a poor defence-the facts were there to
be known. I am in the position of the young Nazi who, in the
beginning at least, knew nothing of the murders and death camps,
looked away from the lesser iniquities, and saw in Hitler the renewer of
German culture, the avenger of the wrongs of Versailles, and the
champion of western civilization against the barbarism of bolshevism.
How ought one to look back on such a past? Certainly with some
sense of humility, of regret, and of the fallibility of political action, but
beyond that I am not sure. I cannot say that I have been ravaged by
feelings of guilt. I do, however, envy my radical contemporaries who
had the good sense
to
remain politically independent.
The experience, in the fifties, of being subpoenaed by the House
Un -American Activities Committee would not have encouraged me to
join any other radical groups, had there been any
to
join. Three people
had been fired from my university because they had refused to answer
the questions of that Committee and I had decided that I cou ld not give
the Committee the names of my former associates. So I was faced with
the possibility of losing my job and my career. But it was not just the
question of losing my job-one can always, I thought, find a way to
live. But the only way in which I cou ld do anything I felt worth doing
was by being a teacher, a scholar, an academic. The thought that all
that might come to a sudden end had a dampening effect on my
political activities. There was no support avai lable within the univer–
sity. The A.A.U.P. was powerless, and there was no organization on the
outside which could help. This was not the case in England, but it was
certainly true of American academic society in the fifties. My notions of
the kind of world I would like to see have not changed much since 1940
(although my belief in its ever becoming real has faded a little), but
after McCarthy I became cautious in revealing those notions.
Being a Communist at Oxford and Harvard did not, I think,
matter much one way or another politically. We did little, and what we
did had no impact on the practical world of affairs. But being
politically active did have, indirectly, a very important and lasting
effect. I and many of my contemporaries came to believe, with Mat–
thiessen and Tawney, that the academy is lifeless and pedantic unless it
