RONALD RADOSH
567
hand, and softness towards totalitarianism and Communism on the
other, their position was found to be unsatisfactory by those on both
the hard left and far right. As the years passed-and McCarthyism has
become a study of the past rather than, thankfully, a phenomenon of
the present-the tough-minded arguments and debates held by the
intellectual community have become subject of a pervasive and ever
growing myth. Its members have been accused of either being sub–
servient to McCarthyism, of having failed to protest it sufficiently, or
even of paving the ground for Joe McCarthy himself, and finally, of
helping his anti-Communist crusade once he arrived on the scene. The
evidence about their views, obtained easily from reading their dia–
logues and debates in various publications, belies all of these . asser–
tions. It makes it clear that while as a group they had various
differences on certain issues, they were all clear about two things above
all else: they despised McCarthy and considered him to be a dema–
gogue and a thug. They also knew that the stark reality of a dangerous
international Communist movement, along with its American counter–
part, posed a real imminent and serious threat to American democracy.
They demanded that liberals not abandon dealing with how to con–
front that threat, lest they relinquish that task to McCarthy and his
kind alone. Unlike many others, they refused to be fooled into believ–
ing that anyone attacked by McCarthy, McCarran, or the House Com–
mittee on Un-American Activities was a noble and innocent martyred
liberal.
So many decades later, it is time to set the record straight, and to res–
cue the thought and the effort these intellectuals made in a dark and
troubled time. Not everything they wrote was correct; some of their
observations and bromides were way off base. But as a group, they
avoided the trap Joe McCarthy had tried to set for them-that of get–
ting them to defend the innocence of actual Communists because he had
targeted liberals among his enemies. Now that the legitimacy of their
opposition to Communism has been affirmed by historical events, it is
time to stop confusing their anti-Communism with support of
McCarthyism.
