RONALD RADOSH
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attention when Lillian Hellman made it in her now famous retrospec–
tive look back at the McCarthy years. Reflecting on the views of her old
friends Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hellman wrote that the "good maga–
zines" they wrote for, particularly the literary-political journal
Partisan
Review,
failed to stand up substantially to the threat posed by the
McCarthyites to America's intellectual and cultural life. Its editors
protested endlessly against the persecution of dissidents in Eastern
Europe, she wrote, but "never took an editorial position against
McCarthy himself"; nor, she added, did
Commentary,
although she
claimed that Irving Kristol did use its pages to attack McCarthy'S crit–
ics. The idea that this intellectual community succumbed to McCarthy–
ism has spread far and wide. The British journalist Godfrey Hodgson,
in his widely discussed and influential overview,
America In Our Time,
thus refers to the "trajectory, in hardly more than a decade,
of.Partisan
Review.
..
from dutiful Stalinism through Trotskyite heresy to the bleak–
est Cold War anti-Communist orthodoxy."
It has become accepted wisdom, evidently, to believe that without the
respectability given to anti-Communism by the treason of the New York
intellectuals, who abandoned their commitment to intellectual responsi–
bility out of a desire to be accepted as part of the great American cele–
bration, that McCarthy and his orgy of demagoguery would never have
been possible. So many decades after the events, the time has finally
come to reassess and reevaluate what it was exactly that this small but
influential group was saying, and to examine more closely what its
response actually was to the emergence of Senator Joseph McCarthy
and his postwar crusade.
As a group of intellectuals, the different members were concerned
with nuance. Having been aware since the 1930S of the reality of Stal–
inism, and having developed over the years many legitimate reasons for
opposition to American Communism, the intellectuals looked askance
at the way in which their concerns were now being bowdlerized and
parodied by the likes of Joe McCarthy and his cohorts. Nevertheless,
they were concerned with how to deal with very real issues relating to
national security, while avoiding indiscriminate witch-hunts against real
dissenters and radicals. Most importantly, they never wavered in their
understanding that international Communism, and its American affili–
ate, were serious dangers to the American polity.
Indeed, the issues they debated and the positions they espoused con–
tinue to reverberate, as was made clear most recently in the brouhaha
over the lifetime recognition award given to director Elia Kazan by the
Motion Picture Academy in 1999. To many of the Hollywood left wing,
