The perils of a public intellectual - George W. Hartmann - Experts in the Service of Social Reform: SPSSI, Psychology, and Society, 1936-1996

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 1998 by Benjamin Harris

the audience was more or less indifferent up to the time of Hartmann's address . . . [which] was received . . . very enthusiastically and ended with the entire audience standing and cheering for several minutes. . . . He is a brilliant speaker and appeared to more than sell an already partially-sympathetic audience on his ideas.(5) (FBI, New York Field Office, 1944a, pp. 80, 111)

In his address, Hartmann analyzed the war from a socialist-pacifist viewpoint, with added themes of brotherhood and equality. In his view, German and Japanese war making was a natural reaction to trade barriers and lack of natural resources. "By artificially creating scarcity, we created war," he explained (U.S. Army, 1944, p. 7). Believing that the Roosevelt administration was needlessly continuing the war to compensate for a weak domestic economy, Hartmann sounded a Marxist chord:

Our capitalist world order did not know how to abolish unemployment except by giving the people guns and sending them off to shoot each other. Prosperity returned as soon as the killing began, and as soon as the killing ceases, the depression cycle starts again. (U.S. Army, p. 6)

After a year of war, he explained, it was the Allies' demand of unconditional surrender that prolonged the conflict and made the Axis fight so fiercely. Attributing equal blame to all countries, he proposed that all enter into a world peace conference and urged his audience to action:

Because all the warring nations have been selfish and stupid in roughly equal measure, we must now spend one-half of our incomes murdering one another. But - we can wage peace as well as war. Its weapons are action, not fireside talks, toward the satisfying of human needs, and the ending of misery and privation wherever men are found. (U.S. Army, p. 7)

Peace Now Under Attack

Following Hartmann's performance at Carnegie Hall, governmental and pro-war groups recognized Peace Now as "the youngest of the pacifist groups [but] the most prominent and potentially the most dangerous" (U.S. Army, 1944, p. 1). In response, Hartmann and the PNM were subjected to 6 months of intense political, institutional, and personal pressure. Characteristically, Hartmann's response was to defend his positions, attack his critics, and expand the scope of his campaign. This increased his public exposure, invited further retaliation, and isolated him from his more moderate colleagues. Eventually, it led to his breakdown and the dissolution of the PNM.

Immediately following the Carnegie Hall rally, the Communist Party and its allies ratcheted up their anti-PNM campaign. First, the Daily Worker and New Masses urged the Justice Department to investigate the PNM and Harvard to fire Hartmann ("Hitler's Doves," 1944; "Smoking out Treason," 1944; "'Socialist' OK's Defeat," 1944). In the labor movement, the Communist Party told the unions it controlled to pass anti-PNM resolutions, offering to write the text if the officers were too busy ("Insist 'Peace Now' Rally Be Banned," 1944). And across the country, local unions reprinted an attack on Hartmann by a journalist for the leftist Federated Press named Betty Goldstein (later Betty Friedan).(6) Under pressure from Communist Party- dominated groups, a February talk by Hartmann at a prominent New York church was cancelled (Holmes, 1944).