The Cause That Failed: Communism in American Political Life. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 3, 1990 by Ronald Radosh

Radosh teaches history at Queensborough Community College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is co-author of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth.

IT IS ONE of the great ironies of our age that, as Communism has I failed the world over (the seeds of rebellion having reached even the Soviet Union), opposition to Communism in the United States remains suspect. Any critical study of the role played by American Communists and fellow-travellers from the 1930s through the 1960s is seen as irrelevant and passe, as an intellectual form of "red-baiting." When Angela Davis speaks at a major university, she is referred to in the press only as a "black activist"; when a major Communist functionary dies, a New York Times obituary describes him as a Marxist educator and activist. One year ago, a minor imbroglio arose when columnist Tom Wicker objected to the categorization of Owen Lattimore as a pro-Communist and fellow-traveller, regarding such a depiction of the late professor's views as McCarthyism redux. After all, Lattimore is the archetypal victim of Joe McCarthy. Thus McCarthy's false assertion that Lattimore was a top Soviet agent makes irrelevant the fact that Lattimore did support Stalin's purge trials.

It remains fashionable to be antianti-Communist.

Guenter Lewy has managed to put all this into context: he examines anew how our political culture moved from a realization that Communism was a menace to freedom, to the conviction that it was merely a benign form of illiberalism. Those who persisted in opposing Communism themselves came to be regarded as freedom's main enemy. Mr. Lewy begins his story by refreshing our memories about Communism's early history, and about the technique of using carefully contrived and controlled fronts, which were able to gain the cooperation of trusting liberals. Here Lewy depends on the scholarly work of Theodore Draper, Harvey KAehr, Irving Howe, and Lewis Coser.

Where Mr. Lewy's book becomes original is in its discussion of liberal anti-Communism in the postwar era--the time in which the "progressives" (and their Communist allies) ran Henry A. Wallace for President, and President Harry S Truman fervently responded to the Soviet threat. If there is a single great myth perpetrated by the Left, it is the association between Truman and McCarthy-the nonsense that Truman's anti-Communism led inexorably to the demagoguery of McCarthy. Mr. Lewy lets neither leftists nor paleoconservatives off the hook. He is clearheaded about the harm McCarthy did to anti-Communism. To the anti-anti-Communists of The Nation, all anti-Communism was per se witch-hunting. To NATIONAL REVIEW, McCarthyism was a defensible program of action against America's enemies, although, as Mr. Lewy points out, Bill Buckley admitted that Senator McCarthy was guilty of exaggerations. And of course conservatives were correct when they argued that, contrary to the charge of Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre, America was not a police state. Nevertheless, Mr. Lewy comments, [conservatives] paid insufficient attention to the spirit of conformity McCarthy had been able to impose upon the country. .. They also minimized McCarthy's depravity, his use of the big lie and the reckless smear." It was, according to Mr. Lewy, the now vanishing breed of anti-Communist leftists and liberals who condemned both McCarthyism and Communism: men like James Wechsler, Sidney Hook, and Norman Thomas-all of whom recognized the threat posed to America by Soviet power, but at the same time realized that McCarthy's version of history was often wrongheaded.

With the demise of McCarthyism, however, came a revival of anti-antiCommunism. The logic, Mr. Lewy argues, was simple: "The victims and opponents of as reactionary and vicious a politician as Senator McCarthy surely could not be all bad ... and deserved some sympathy and protection." Thus McCarthy's anti-Communism served to discredit all anti-Communism. Never having experienced the manipulative behavior of Communists, or having viewed how their line changed overnight in relation to new foreign-policy needs of Moscow, a new generation of activists began to equate all anti-Communism--even that of the, so-called, cold-war liberals-with McCarthyism. The New Left argued that cold-war liberalism led inexorably to the war in Vietnam. Indeed, refusal to make common cause with Communists was itself called McCarthyism. And the conviction that some Communists Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs) really were traitors was proof that cold-war liberals were indistinguishable from McCarthyites.

Thus the new revisionism led from anti-anti-Communism to pro-Communism, culminating in an academic industry devoted to building up the sordid history of the American Communist Party. Acknowledging that the Party made some errors, they wrote (to quote Theodore Draper), "as if Communists were fallen angels and anti-Communists were the devil's own disciples."

Mr. Lewy does a yeoman's job exposing the new anti-anti-Communism within liberal peace groups (the SANE Nuclear Policy Committee, for example), student-activist bodies (such as the Students for a Democratic Society), and even the American Civil Liberties Union. All these groups, he shows in detail, moved away from their original programs and agendas towards a left-wing stance, and all came to accept participation and support of Communists as worthy and well advised. Even Americans for Democratic Action, originally the mainstay of liberal anti-Communism, became a part of the 1970s Popular Front. What Lewy does not sufficiently discuss is why so many of the older liberal and left anti-Communists, like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and Irving Howe, have today moved away from the more sensible positions they held from the 1940s through the 1960s. For instance, Professor Galbraith gave greetings a few years back to one of the last old-line Soviet-backed World Youth Festivals, and in 1988, was keynote speaker at a conference on anti-Communism at Harvard University, in which CPUSA chairman Gus Hall called anti-Communism "the biggest hoax ever prepetrated against a whole people." This substantiates Mr. Lewy's observation that "a substantial segment of the American intellectual community today embraces a philosophy of anti-anti-Communism no less reflexive than the obsessive anti-Communism that [existed] in some circles during the 1950s."