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PARTISAN REVIEW
Kazan had committed the unforgivable sin of naming names before the
House Committee on Un-American Activities, and therefore should not
have been nominated to receive a major award. To others, Kazan's polit–
ical judgments were seen as not so wide of the mark, and they argued
that he should be judged only on the merits of his work in cinema.
We can begin our examination by looking first at the incisive argu–
ments made by Diana Trilling, who had been literary editor of the left–
wing magazine
The Nation,
and the wife of Lionel Trilling, perhaps the
most esteemed and erudite member of the community. Mrs. Trilling
was, as her published diary established, horrified at the crudeness and
nastiness of McCarthy's interrogations. Indeed, Mrs. Trilling made it
clear at the start of her diary entry that she was opposed
"both
to
McCarthy and the Communists." Indeed, she confided that she was
"alarmed by McCarthyism." Yet, she understood what other liberals
failed to comprehend-that "our intense fear of McCarthyism has been
nurtured by the Communists and directly serves the Communist pur–
pose." Yet, as she sat by her radio, she would wait in expectation for
McCarthy to yell out her name "over the air in that awful accent of
righteous condemnation." Nevertheless, she was clear about the main
point: "the
soi-disant
liberals made McCarthyism possible." What she
and her friends were pointing out was that had the New Deal and Fair
Deal liberals faced the nature of Communism head on, there would
have been no vacuum for a Joe McCarthy to enter.
Indeed, Mrs. Trilling insisted that good liberals had two enemies–
McCarthy and the Communists-and she rejected even a temporary
alliance with either of them. In intellectual circles, it was easy to attack
and to condemn McCarthy. But what upset her was that so many of her
liberal friends failed to comprehend the "true nature of the Communist
danger." To seek to root out Communists from arenas of influence, in
Mrs. Trilling's eyes, was hardly McCarthyite, because it was necessary
and correct. Thus, no public figure irritated her more than Lord
Bertrand Russell, who years earlier, had been among the first intellectu–
als to accurately characterize the nature of Soviet Communism.
Mrs. Trilling felt that in the I950S, Russell had begun to lose the clar–
ity of his early thinking. Russell and other European intellectuals, she
noted, were spreading the false idea that the United States was near the
condition of Fascist Germany in the I940s. "The idea that America is a
terror-stricken country in the grip of hysteria is a Communist-inspired
idea," she wrote, and that so influential a figure as Lord Russell could
spread such nonsense was most unsettling. Therefore, unlike Russell, she
saw it as a "reasonable function of the legislative body" to investigate
