RONALD RADOSH
555
is a totalitarianism as absolute as that of Nazi Germany...and that...
one also knows how impossible it is for a local Communist Party to be
free to pursue its own objectives." McCarthy and his supporters may
have screamed "Twenty Years of Treason" as an epithet for the Demo–
cratic Party's years in power. That charge would not have had any merit
had mainstream liberalism not been directed at "persuading the Ameri–
can people that Russia was our great ally instead of the enemy of
democracy and peace."
Diana Trilling's point about Hiss and Oppenheimer was treated in a
similar fashion by the literary intellectual Leslie Fiedler, in what was to
become a much more widely known essay. Fiedler wrote that Hiss was
a symbol of "the Popular Front mind at bay, incapable of honesty when
there is no hope in anything else." Hiss's guilt was in fact that of his
entire generation of liberals, who shared in his guilt when they defended
him. Like Hiss, they argued that "service to the party and the Soviet
Union is an expression of 'loyalty,' not 'treason'," since it was prefer–
able to the "bourgeois success of the American Dream" which for the
Left was "the final treachery." Hiss, in fact, had attained the pinnacle of
success in the nation that he betrayed. He achieved this because it was
the Popular Front that allowed him to serve both his own government
and the Soviet Union. And well-meaning liberals shared Hiss's guilt,
because they too "collaborated in the hoax" of Soviet-American unity,
which had been resurrected after the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
To those liberals, their enemy was Whittaker Chambers, whom they
viewed as a "scorned squea ler." Hiss was simply a "hopeless liar."
Fiedler pointed to the anomaly that not everyone accused by the
McCarthyites was innocent. Those who viewed everyone who was left
of center as a Red made the same mistake as those who exonerated
everyone accused who denied their guilt, that of failing to distinguish
between an actual liberal and a Stalinist. The liberals who exonerated
Hiss and spent their energy condemning the Un-American Activities
Committee out of fear that they would be "playing into the hands of the
enemy," were thereby giving the McCarthyites the honor of being the
only ones telling the truth. Thus Fiedler saw the Hiss case as that of a
generation on trial, one that substituted "sentimentality for intelli–
gence." Its members did not all serve the GPU, but committed a worse
sin; they
d~nied
its very existence. And so, Fiedler concluded, the "age
of innocence" was dead.
If
the debate over Alger Hiss's guilt or innocence was less controver–
sial-for a good many believed that Hiss was guilty-the debate over
the charges made against Owen Lattimore, a distinguished China
