566
PARTISAN REVIEW
with the dangers to freedom stemming from people like Freda Kirchwey
[editor of
The Nation]
and Arthur Miller than the dangers from people
like Senator McCarthy."
At stake, the historian Mary S. McAuliffe has written, were two very
different views of the world. To the liberals of
The Nation,
she com–
mented, "the United States was in the grips of hysteria, and it defined
the hysterical as those who so feared the threat of Communism that they
responded by subverting basic civil liberties in their hunt for Commu–
nists." To the anti-Communist liberals of the
New Leader,
and one
would have to add those associated with both
Commentary
and
Parti–
san Review,
hysteria was rampant and dangerous, but. ..the international and
domestic Communist menace was real, and those alert to its threat
were realistic. Those who thought that McCarthy commanded any
real power and had committed any real damage were the ones who
were hysterical. . ..[They] emphatically did not approve of
McCarthy, but. ..concluded that McCarthyism had not permeated
American society and that McCarthy posed no real threat to Amer–
ican liberties. The real danger. . .was from creeping Communism,
not creeping McCarthyism.
It is true that despite their differences, the anti-Communist liberals
unanimously held one assumption. They all argued that one could
maintain a commitment to civil liberties and at the same time oppose
participation with Communists in joint efforts, and therefore could and
should exclude them from membership in liberal organizations.
It
was
not McCarthyism when the ADA charter excluded Communists from
membership, or when the American Civil Liberties Union expelled the
Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from its board. Similarly,
they held, with great merit, that it was not a violation of civil liberties
to point out that Communists had no right to a government job. As
Hook stressed over and over again, Communists had a right to express
their ideas, and to have them debated in the public marketplace.
It
was
not their ideas they favored banning, but their demands for jobs
through which they could subvert America's national security, which
was quite a different thing.
Throughout their writing, the anti-Communist liberals and socialists
grappled with tough questions at a volatile moment in our nation's
recent past. Trying to steer a careful middle ground between acquies–
cence to demagoguery and the violation of civil liberties on the one
