Books
Reconsidering American Communism
THE SECRET WORLD OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM. By Harvey
Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov. Yale University
Press. $25.00.
In 1953, Sidney Hook created a storm of controversy, and hatred
and opprobrium from most of the left, with his still much discussed arti–
cle and book,
Heresy, Yes
-
Conspiracy, No.
Writing during the heyday
of McCarthyism, Hook argued that the dismissal from teaching posts of
some members of the American Communist Party had not been carried
out unjustly. He had always defended the rights of teachers and scholars
to espouse any views, including Communism, and he opposed the use of
political association as a criteria for determining academic fitness. But he
firmly believed that membership in the Communist Party itself rendered a
teacher unfit to be a member of a teaching staff, insofar as that member
firmly adhered to well-known tenets of Party membership.
For Hook, the key consideration was that the Communist Party was
not just another left-wing American political party. Rather, Hook ar–
gued, it was a conspiracy. Reading through the recently published selec–
tion of his correspondence
(Letters oj Sidney Hook: Democracy, Commun–
ism, and the Cold War,
edited by Edward S. Shapiro), one is impressed
with how many times Hook comes back to this point. Individual Com–
munists, he told one correspondent, were "all actual or potential agents
of a foreign power." That did not mean they should be imprisoned, he
admonished, but it certainly meant that they should be denied access to
positions where if they obeyed orders given to them by the Party, they
could damage American security. As Hook wrote:
The relevant principle is that the facts about the c.P. justify us in
drawing a
prima Jacie
case against members in respect to employability
or reliability for certain types of jobs - teaching, the military, gov–
ernment.... The inference based on present and active membership is
that the individual is likely to carry out the instructions, which he has
voluntarily accepted, and that the sensible thing to do is to prevent
him from doing it.
The Party, in other words, was a conspiracy. Its primary allegiance,
and that of its members, was to a foreign government - the Soviet
Union - whose regime and leadership it regarded as living gods. Watch-
