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"support" over a quarter of a century ago people like the Hollywood
Ten and Hellman, who were at the time both Stalinists and targets
of red-hunting politicians.
Navasky reports Albert Maltz's rejection of Hellman's claim
that she stood "alone against the McCarthyite crowd, when in fact
she was a private in a virtual army of resisters." Quite so, and the
largest and noisiest battalions were led by Communists and well–
known fellow-travelers, virtually until news of Khrushchev's secret
speech decimated the Party itself, by which time McCarthyism was
also waning. A liberal or social democrat who thought the CP never
posed a clear and present danger to the country, who hated
McCarthyism for undermining civil liberties, but who also hated
and feared Stalin's growing domination of Eastern Europe and his
efforts to extend it by force westward and in Korea, and who
supported the Marshall Plan and the containment policy, was hardly
a welcome recruit to this army of resisters. These views
defined
an
anti-Communist liberal at the time. Even groups organized by non–
Communists, such as the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee
(praised by Navasky for having "refused to advertise their
reservations about Communism"), identified the enemy simply as
"anti-Communism," as I well recall from attendance at the ECLC's
organizing conference held in Princeton.
Navasky maintains that the small group associated with
Dissent
was isolated and exceptional in outspokenly condemning both
Stalinism and McCarthyism, overlooking that the degree to which
McCarthyism presented a threat to freedom and how best to oppose
it were subjects of bitter controversy within the entire anti–
Communist li beral intellectual community. Those few intellectuals
who supported the Senator removed themselves from that
community and those who declined to take him seriously were a
small, much-criticized minority within it. Even the ACCF, which
had actually been created to counter Communist mobilization of
artists and intellectuals in support of the pro-Soviet Stockholm Peace
Petition, was riven with discord over the McCarthyism issue. I
attended as a guest a private ACCF meeting at which, it so
happened, the topic of discussion was the blacklist in the
entertainment industry. No one defended it: there was vehement
argument against the view put forward by a few people that the
public had a right to know if the entertainers it patronized were
supporters of the enemy in the Korean war . ACCF membership was
broadly based, including figures like Kennan, Galbraith, and
Oppenheimer, but the group's executive staff remained much more
