DAVID SIDORSKY
333
Journey
included a central character based on Whittaker Chambers, the
most significant anticommunist "witness" of the I950S. The founding
co-editor of
Partisan Review,
William Phillips, had steered it beyond the
limiting boundaries of political discussion to focus on the spectrum of
contemporary literary and cultural movements that included Phillips's
own special interests in the modernist literary criticism of T. S. Eliot and
the literary theory of Sigmund Freud. Yet as the Cold War deepened, the
issues associated with anticommunism retained their central position
within American intellectual and political culture.
In
this context, the mercurial rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who
had emerged as a leading protagonist of an alternative type of anticom–
munism, had to be confronted by the longtime supporters of the anti–
communist movement. Senator McCarthy'S tactics led to a split among
the members of the editorial board of
Partisan Review.
There was a
division between Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, and William Phillips, on
the one hand, and James Burnham, who argued that it was a fallacy of
moral equivalence or a false moral symmetry to equate the millions of
murders which the communists had carried out with the handful of
errors made by Senator McCarthy in his charges against communists.
For Burnham, this would seem to be analogous in contemporaneous
terms to an equation between deaths caused by terrorism and deaths
that result from collateral damage caused by counterterrorism.
Hook, Trilling, and Phillips, among others, believed that the anti–
communist cause must dissociate itself completely from the activities of
Senator McCarthy, for both prudential and moral reasons.
In
prudential
terms, the failure to dissociate would facilitate the agenda of the Left to
use the epithet of "McCarthyism" to condemn any kind of anticommu–
nist activity. Burnham's argument was that the Left would condemn
anticommunists as "McCarthyites" no matter how strongly they criti–
cized the tactics of Senator McCarthy.
Further, "McCarthyism," as a cherished intellectual construct of the
Left, was developed to indicate a portent of an incipient nativist Amer–
ican fascism. This construct would be exploited by the Left to develop
a politically useful, broad front of anti-McCarthyism or antifascism in
which hard-core Communists would be mixed with anti-Cold War neu–
tralists, anti-anti-Communists, advocates of peace, and true believers in
civil liberties.
A forceful rejoinder, however, was advanced on moral grounds. The
moral argument was that since the anticommunist movement had its
roots in a protest against the injustice of Stalin's methods, it was unten–
able that this movement should fail to reject any abuse of individuals'
