RONALD RADOSH
The
Legacy
of the Anti-Communist Liberal
Intellectuals
N
OTHING SEEMS TO TROUBLE
a new generation of historians,
who came of age in the I960s, more than the attitude and intel–
lectual positions taken by a small group of liberal intellectuals
during the I950S. This group, forever to be called "the New York intel–
lectuals" since the late Irving Howe named them, have come to be por–
trayed as a group who squandered their once proud liberal heritage, and
who inadvertently gave their support and their backing
to
the national
hysteria that gripped America during the McCarthy years.
Writing two decades ago, the historian Mary S. McAuliffe argued
that in rejecting what she mistakenly calls the "American left," when
she clearly meant the pro-Communist left, liberals had accepted "the
basic assumptions and tactics of the Red Scare itself." McAuliffe argued
that the liberal intellectuals excluded Communists "from the arena of
permissible public debate and, as a result, lost sight of vital civil liber–
ties." Writing more recently, the historian Ellen Shrecker has provided
the basic contemporary indictment: the New York intellectuals, she
writes, "functioned as a kind of intelligence service for the [right-wing
anti-Communist] network." Although they thought of themselves as
different from McCarthyites, they were doing their work for them. They
developed both the term "Stalinist" and the concept "totalitarian," both
of which, according to Shrecker, muddied the waters by failing to make
"distinctions between Stalin's crimes and Hitler's and stressing the sim–
ilarities rather than the differences between Communism and fascism."
In allying themselves with the Right to oppose Communists, and in
refusing to continue the wartime Popular Front, these New York intel–
lectuals made "their own...contribution to the postwar wave of polit–
ical repression." Indeed, she claims, "the New York intellectuals'
depiction of Communism differed little in its main outlines from that of
Joe McCarthy."
Professor Shrecker's judgment is a harsh one, and it is not unique to
her alone. The position she espouses is anti-anti-Communism, and it is
a stance that has become all too common. Indeed, the argument gained
