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"McCarthyism is bad on the whole, therefore none of its elements are
necessary or even defensible." And like Sidney Hook, he believed that
Communists had no right to teach, since they had abandoned "their
freedom to serve truth," and were members of an "external conspirato–
rial authority." As for McCarthy, Thomas saw through the Senator's
game. He made "noisy, indiscriminate criticism of communism" and
named Communists he could not identify. His tactics only helped the
Communists, giving them respectability by allowing them to confuse
themselves "with decent dissenters."
Aside from the obvious fellow travelers and pro-Communists, oppo–
sition to the analysis of the liberal anti-Communists came from those to
their left who had begun their political life in the small Trotskyist com–
munity. One of the first to espouse anti-anti-Communism was the young
socialist, Michael Harrington. Looking at the position taken by the
members of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, Harrington
was aghast at the logic used by many whom he regarded as political
comrades. Harrington saw their arguments as part of a "systematic,
explicit effort to minimize the threat to civil liberties. " Moreover, their
drive against civil liberties was being carried out in the name of anti–
Stalinism.
In
particular, Harrington condemned his mentor Norman
Thomas's support of the charges made against Owen Lattimore as
"sad-indeed, humiliating." That Thomas, Harrington wrote, "identi–
fied in American eyes with the cause of socialism, should have let him–
self be put in the position of defending" Senator Pat McCarran's charges
revealed to him something about "the debacle of American radicalism
and liberal politics in general." Like Popular Front liberals, it seemed,
Harrington too seemed unable to make the distinction between liberals
and Communists that Hook, Diana Trilling, Schlesinger, and Rovere
demanded.
Further to the left, Irving Howe, the literary critic and once a revolu–
tionary Trotskyist, had started his own magazine,
Dissent,
as a medium
from which to reassert the values of democratic socialism, as well as to
distinguish himself and his comrades from the anti-Communist liberals
and sociali sts like Sidney Hook. Thus Howe referred to the "willfulness
of those who see only terror and the indifference of those who see only
health," and demanded acceptance of his belief that "intellectual free–
dom...is under severe attack and the intellectuals have...shown a
painful lack of militancy in defending the rights" of those accused by the
McCarthyites. Howe, for the first time, condemned
Commentary
in
particular for trying to adapt liberalism to the status quo, and sarcasti–
cally commented that "the magazine was more deeply preoccupied...
