SOCIAL SCIENCES
NATIONAL wwe RE VEE W
A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF OPINION
Peace — with Honor
WILLIAM F. KNOWLAND
They'll Never Get Me —
On That Couch MORRIE RYSKIND
I Raised Money for the Ivy League
ALOISE HEATH
(a A aR RTE NEN Articles and Reviews by JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
JAMES BURNHAM + RUSSELL KIRK +: FRANK S. MEYER WILLMOORE KENDALL «: FREDA UTLEY : C. D. WILLIAMS
YW Niotss—Fis!
from WA SH ! N G TO N straight
Out of the West
Toward the end of President Eisen- hower’s Denver convalescence, he had an hour-long chat with an old friend, Dan Thornton, former Governor of Colorado. In the wake of that meeting comes word of a political stirring and rallying in at least eight plain and mountain states. Ranchers and farm- ers in Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Ore- gon, Washington, Texas, New Mexico and Nebraska are reportedly organiz- ing in support of Cattleman Thornton for the Republican Presidential nomi- nation.
Considering his long and intimate * association with the President, it is searcely conceivable that Governor Thornton would permit the formation of such an organization in his behalf if he were not sure in his own mind that Mr. Eisenhower intends to retire. It is a virtual cinch that Thornton would support the President should he desire to be renominated, and it is a certainty that he cannot be unaware of the ac- tivity of those promoting his own can- didacy. Whether this means that Ike has given his good friend Dan the Green Light remains to be seen. Sources close to the White House sec- retariat hotly deny the possibility. Other observers contend that Mr. Eis- enhower had decided before his heart attack not to run, and that Mr. Thorn- ton may have known of that decision.
As the most conservative member of the Eisenhower inner circle, Thornton is envisioned by his friends as a magnet to attract both Taft Republicans and Southern Democrats. Born on a Texas sharecropper farm in 1911, Thornton credits the American way of life for the opportunities that enabled him to at- tain economic success and the gover- norship of an important state. His mother and father still live in Texas and, like his two brothers and one sis- ter, are registered Democrats. As one admirer sees it, “Dan Thornton would have more chance of carrying some Southern states in ’56 than any other Republican including President Eisen- hower.”
2 NATIONAL REVIEW
A NEWSLETTER
The Thornton candidacy is heavily discounted by some members of the President’s official family, but the fact remains that organization activities are in actual process, including the rental of a suite of rooms in a Washington hotel by the public relations agent of one of the Governor’s friends.
Not Herter, Not Hoffman, Not Now
Early in 1951 a small band of Eastern financiers, international bankers and industrialists organized the Eisenhow- er boom and entrusted its inflation to a New York advertising firm. The rest is history.
Among the multiple rumors that contefindhe to the opacity of the Wash- ington atmosphere is an inner-echelon story that the same intrepid band is now prepared to underwrite a pre- convention campaign for Governor Herter of Massachusetts, with Paul Hoffman as running-mate. A _ spot check of authoritative sources failed to produce the slightest substantiation of the Herter-Hoffman boomlet or any variation thereof. One of the principals in the original band of Eisenhowerites stated emphatically, “The President is still my candidate. We think he will be able to run. Until and unless he decides that he does not want to, there is no one else to consider. . . .”
This sentiment coincides happily with that of Sherman Adams, High Ad- miral of the White House Palace Guard, who has been feeding tidbits of optimism spiced with caution to a press which for the most part gives comfort to the wishful thinkers who foresee Ike’s renomination. The other side of the picture, notably Mrs. Eisenhower’s preference for her husband’s retire- ment and the President’s own pre- sumptive desire to take his ease at Gettysburg, receive scant space. A few enterprising reporters, however, re- turned from Denver with a very posi- tive conviction that Mr. Eisenhower will not be a candidate. The source of their information is not for the record but it is convincing.
SAM M. JONES
In the Paddock
In the event the President’s retire- ment is announced by mid-winter, the largest herd of Republican dark horses in twenty-eight years may go to the post in the March New Hampshire pri- maries. In addition to those who are willing to risk their all in the first pri- mary hurdle, there are likely to be many others who will prefer to wait and hope for a deadlock at the con- vention.
Foremost among those who might test the New Hampshire political climate is William F. Knowland of California, Senate Minority Leader. Realistic ob- servers believe that the real challenge to Vice President Nixon’s ambition is not the overt antipathy of Governor Goodwin Knight of California but the strength of Senator Knowland. A care- fully prepared compilation of the Re- publican record and his own convic- tions appeared in the press release of a speech by the Senator on October 28. Although it received scant space in most of the public prints, it has already attained recognition as an important public document as well as the basis for a prospective bid for the Presidency.
Demiocrat’s Dilemma
Governor Frank Lausche, Conserva- tive Democrat, whose vote-getting ability in Ohio is second only to that of the late Bob Taft, can in all probability defeat Republican incumbent George Bender for a seat in the Senate next fall. If Governor Lausche could get the Democratic Presidential nomination he would be a formidable contender against any GOP candidate. Governor Lausche can have his party’s Senato- rial nomination for the asking, but a try for top place on the national ticket means a tough, costly fight at long odds. The Governor and his advisors are seeking to determine the substance of Southern support before deciding whether to tackle Senator Estes Ke- fauver in the Ohio primaries next spring as a curtain-raiser for the con- vention battle.
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NATIONAL REVIEW
A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF OPINION
EDITOR and PUBLISHER: Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. EDITORS James Burnham Wilimoore Kendall Suzanne La Follette Jonathan Mitchell William S. Schlamm PRODUCTION EDITOR: Mabel Wood WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT Sam M. Jones ASSOCIATES and CONTRIBUTORS L. Brent Bozell, John Chamberlain, Frank Cho- dorov, John Abbot Clark, Forrest Davis, Max Eastman, Medford Evans, Karl Hess, Russell Kirk, Eugene Lyons, Frank S. Meyer, Gerhart Niemeyer, E. Merrill Root, Morrie Ryskind, Freda Utley, Richard Weaver FOREIGN CONTRIBUTORS London: F. A. Voigt, Paris: Eudocio Ravines, Taipei: John C. Caldwell, Vienna: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Zurich: Wilhelm Roepke BUSINESS MANAGER: Arthur W. D. Harris ADVERTISING MANAGER: Theodore A. Driscoll
CONTENTS NOVEMBER 19,1955 VOL.1I, NO.1 I i ss ined endnaieacinictiistenigsinnil 3 PUBLISHER’S STATEMENT o.00000.0....0.000-0000000+ 5 ARTICLES:
Peace—with Honor .... William F. Knowland 9 How to Raise Money in the
SRE Aloise Heath 13 They'll Never Get Me on PU I oicicicccccseceensosena Morrie Ryskind 21 DEPARTMENTS: From Washington, Straight ..Sam M. Jones 2 The Liberal Line ............ Willmoore Kendall 8 National Trends ...................... L. Brent Bozell 12 SE OS ee ee 16 CTT TLE DS C.B.R. 17 The Law of the Jt ae C. Dickerman Williams 18 0 Sn Jonathan Mitchell 19 The Third World War ........ James Burnham 20 The Printed Word ....0.0....00....0..0000000. Karl Hess 24 From the Academy ................... Russell Kirk 25
Arts and Manners ................ Morrie Ryskind 26
BOOKS IN REVIEW:
Sorry Triumph .................. John Chamberlain 27
The Paradox of France ................ Freda Utley 28
Motion from the Floor .............. Robert Phelps 29
Croce on Liberty .................... Frank S. Meyer 29
Portrait of a Saint .................. Philip Burnham 30 NATIONAL is published weekly at
Orange, Conn. by National Weekly, Ine ly. Inc. Copyrighted 1955 in the U.S.A. by National Weekly, -, = pplication for acceptance as controlled circulation pending at Orange, Conn. EDITORIAL AND 5 ee Se OFFICES: 211 East 37 S New York 16, NY. Telephone: MUrray Hill 2-0941
RATES: Twenty cents a copy: $7.00 a year, $13.00 for two years. Foreign, $9.00 a ag Cana .00 a year.
The cess cannot 2 le for ‘unsolicited manuscripts un- less re stage, or ~~ S stamped, self-addressed Sa is A] inions expressed in signed articles do not
represent the views of the editors.
The WKEK
W elcome Back
By a coincidence that is unqualifiedly happy for us, our first issue leaves the printshop on the day that the Pres- ident, his health hopefully recovering, quits the Denver hospital. In the days to come, and even in this first issue, we shall be critical, sometimes sharply so, of those Ad- ministration policies with which we disagree—that, after all, will be part of our business. But no disagree- ment will lessen our whole-hearted wish for the per- sonal well-being and happiness of the man who is the elected head of our country and its government.
Loyalties and Abstractions
For debate in this month’s chapter meetings of the As- sociation for the United Nations we would like to pro- pose the recent election in the Saar. United Europers, world government devotees and even many of their own leaders have been explaining to the Saarlanders for a decade that reason, self-interest and every pro- gressive principle demanded a vote for “Europeaniza- tion.” But in the stubborn way that people have, they voted their loyalty not to the empty abstraction of a non-existent “united Europe” but to the communi- ties with which they identified themselves by ancestral and living tradition. Queries for the discussion period: Do we really believe that bad Frenchmen or Germans make good “Europeans”? If men are cowardly as Ital- ians or Americans, will they be heroic as United Nationalists?
British Patience Runs Out
It has long been suspected that pro-Communists con- sciously and slyly played upon British gentility, and found it their stoutest weapon. When, four years ago, the Messrs. Maclean and Burgess slipped across to France, the pro-Communists uttered soft cries of pro- test at the inconvenience they were being put to, and found no one rude enough to dispute them. This week British gentility exploded in a snarl of pent-up indig- nation. The Maclean-Burgess scandal became over- night the first issue before Parliament and Colonel Marcus Lipton, the Labor member who was pressing it, the leader of an embattled, apparently solid public opinion. It was a strange twist that, at the moment Americans were stuffing the subversion problem into a closet (see Mr. Bozell’s column), the British were dragging it out and preparing to deal with it.
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 3
The Election
Off-year elections seldom show national trends, and the one of November 8 was reliably ambiguous. Perhaps most interesting was Indiana, supposedly the most finely-poised of weathervane states. For two years the Dewey men in the White House have been warring on Senators Jenner and Capehart. This year, Indian- apolis and a half dozen other communities went Demo- cratic; there were no offsetting Republican gains. The silent Renaissance in-fighting of the Dewey crowd may be helpful to the Liberal cause, but not to the Repub- lican Party.
In New Jersey, where World Federalism arouses the same bigotry that segregation does in the deep South, Democratic “liberals” made a well-publicized effort to capture the state legislature. They made small gains, but failed in their objective. Ohio voters rejected en- abling legislation for Mr. Walter Reuther’s program of Supplementary Unemployment Payments — the cur- rent residue of his Guaranteed Annual Wage. The vote, however, seems to have swung on other issues. Prob- ably the chief meaning of the election, across the na- tion, was that American families are moving their homes and work at a baffling rate, and there are fewer and fewer encrusted communities and “safe” precincts.
Feel Free
Elsewhere in this issue, the wise and large-hearted Mr. Russell Kirk offers some kindly advice to Mr. Robert Hutchins. Get back, he says, for the health of education, to education; and get out of politics, for the sake of politics. Mr. Kirk also draws attention to an admirable statement by Mr. Hutchins, made recently, in which he confessed to certain traits of character which manifestly incapacitated him for the post of chief executive of a large university. Perhaps twenty years hence, in another mood and, we hope, a different age, Mr. Hutchins will reflect, without pride, on his steward- ship of the Fund for the Republic, which day by day, in every way, grows more and more insolent, more and more hysterical, more and more irresponsible. After the scandal of the bibliography, something had to give. So last week Mr. Hutchins called in the press, to an- swer questions. At the conference, Mr. Hutchins de- fended every move the Fund for the Republic has ever made, asserted that he would be glad to hire Commu- nists “if they qualify”; that he had no objection to those who pleaded the Fifth Amendment since after all it is “a part of the Bill of Rights, there to be used”; that the Attorney General’s list is an outrage, and so on and so on. It was unmistakably the same Mr. Hutchins who wrote a year or so ago for Look Magazine that, in effect, a donation to Harvard in these days of terror repre- sents an act of raw physical courage.
There was something tangible, for all who attended. Everyone received, with the compliments of the Fund
4 NATIONAL REVIEW "
for the Republic, a book of matches, inscribed “Feel Free.” So that’s the way to fight the Communists! Just leave everything to the Fund for the Republic. To hell with congressional investigating committees, the FBI, the American Legion, and all those other agents of conformity!
A Reasonable Defense of Yalta
“[The author] was born in Baltimore in 1904. He took his A.B. at Johns Hopkins University, and his law degree at Harvard Law School. In 1936 he entered the State Depart- ment, where from 1944 to 1947 he specialized in United Nations affairs. In 1947 he resigned to accept the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was a member of the United States Delegation to the Yalta Conference, serving as technical adviser on questions re- lating to the United Nations. At present he makes his home in New York City.”
This biographical description of Alger Hiss, repro- duced in its entirety, introduces the author of the fea- ture article in the current issue of Pocket Book Maga- zine. The article is called “Yalta: Modern American Myth.” (The article itself is an overwritten curio, in which Mr. Hiss nervously laughs away criticisms of Yalta. The “myth” of Yalta, by the way, is traceable to the fact that “Soviet ascendancy in Eastern Europe has been dismaying to many Americans...” A Freudian slip if ever we saw one!)
It is not surprising that Alger Hiss should defend Yalta. It is, though, surprising that he should defend Yalta in an American magazine. Had he applauded Yalta in Izvestia, he would have done so for the obvi- ous reasons: Yalta did more toward communizing the world than ever could be done by a lifetime of spying, which is all Alger Hiss could offer up for communism.
It must be that Mr. Franklin Watts, the editor of the Pocket Book Magazine,.wanted a defense of Yalta, by a Communist, from the point of view of the West. There is surely a sense in which this is journalistically inter- esting, and perhaps harmonizes with the Spirit of Geneva. Perhaps Pravda will reciprocate by publish- ing an article by Donald Maclean defending the execu- tion of the Rosenbergs.
The failure to include in the biographical note the single most interesting thing about Hiss is very strange, so strange as to prompt us to do something about it. On the very first page of the magazine we are told: “If, as a reader, you have any criticisms, suggestions or com- ments, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please address all communications to Franklin Watts, Editor, The Pocket Book Magazine, 699 Madison Avenue, New York 20, N. Y.”
Very well then. Dear Mr. Watts: Why did you ask a Communist for his views about Yalta in the first place? But having done so, why did you fail to call at- tention to the fact that he is a convicted liar? What have you got for your next issue—“How Chiang Bene- fited from the Marshall Mission,” by Mao Tse-tung?
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Publisher’s Statement
There is, we like to think; solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject the hypodermic approach to world affairs, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is not unconfined.
Let’s face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether pos- sible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tra- dition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the in- dividual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.
“TI happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater,” said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wen- dell Holmes, “but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does.” We have come around to Mr. Holmes’ view, so much so that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater —of anything to anything. (How curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!) The inroads that rela- tivism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of ener- getic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intel- lectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, sim- ply walked in and started to run things.
Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’. Drop a little itching powder in Jimmy Wechsler’s bath and before he has scratched himself for the third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have denounced you in a dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish will kave written ten heroic cantos about our age of ter- ror, Harper’s will have published them, and everyone in sight will have been nominated for a Freedom Award. Conservatives in this country—at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others—are non- licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can
=_—
readily show by pointing to his scars. Radical conserva- tives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.
There are, thank Heaven, the exceptions. There are those of generous impulse and a sincere desire to en- courage a responsible dissent from the Liberal ortho- doxy. And there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses—on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient get- ting and spending is itself impossible except in an at- mosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending. And back of all political institutions there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas—not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word. A vigor- ous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is—dare we say it?—as necessary to better living as Chemistry.
We begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of the Liberals, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Commu- nist, with his inside track to History. All this would not appear to augur well for NATIONAL REVIEW. Yet we start with a considerable—and considered— optimism.
After all, we crashed through. More than one hundred and twenty investors made this magazine possible, and over fifty men and women of small means, invested less than one thousand dollars apiece in it. Two men and one woman, all three with overwhelming personal and public commitments, worked round the clock to make publica- tion possible. A score of professional writers pledged their devoted attention to its needs, and hundreds of thoughtful men and women gave evidence that the ap- pearance of such a journal as we have in mind would profoundly affect their lives.
Our own views, as expressed in a memorandum drafted a year ago, and directed to our investors, are set forth in an adjacent column. We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn’t enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a posi- tion that has not grown old under the weight of a gigan- tic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D’s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar prom- ises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town. WM. F. BUCKLEY, JR.
NOVEMBER 19, 1955
The Magazine's Credenda
Among our convictions:
a. It is the job of centralized government (in peace- time) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of govern- ment—the dominant social feature of this century— musi be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the liber- tarian side.
b. The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to ad- just mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience. On this point we are, without reservations, on the conservative side.
c. The century’s most blatant force of satanic uto- pianism is communism. We consider “coexistence” with communism neither desirable nor possible, nor honor- able; we find ourselves irrevocably at war with com- munism and shall oppose any substitute for victory.
d. The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in educa- tion as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the na- tion their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than “newness”) and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).
e. The most alarming single danger to the American political system lies in the fact that an identifiable team of Fabian operators is bent on controlling both our major political parties — under the sanction of such fatuous and unreasoned slogans as “national unity,” “middle-of-the-road,” “progressivism,” and “biparti- sanship.” Clever intriguers are reshaping both parties in the image of Babbitt, gone Social-Democrat. When and where this political issue arises, we are, without reservations, on the side of the traditional two-party system that fights its feuds in public and honestly; and we shall advocate the restoration of the two-party system at all costs.
f. The competitive price system is indispensable to liberty and material progress. It is threatened not only by the growth of Big Brother government, but by the pressure of monopolies—including union monopolies. What is more, some labor unions have clearly identified themselves with doctrinaire socialist objectives. The characteristic problems of harassed business have gone unreported for years, with the result that the public has been taught to assume—almost instinctively—that conflicts between labor and management are generally traceable to greed and intransigence on the part of management. Sometimes they are; often they are not.
6 NATIONAL REVIEW
NATIONAL REVIEW will explore and oppose the inroads upon the market economy caused by monopolies in general, and politically oriented unionism in particular; and it will tell the violated businessman’s side of the story.
g. No superstition has more effectively bewitched America’s Liberal elite than the fashionable concepts of world government, the United Nations, internation- alism, international atomic pools, etc. Perhaps the most important and readily demonstrable lesson of history is that freedom goes hand in hand with a state of politi- cal decentralization, that remote government is irre- sponsible government. It would make greater sense to grant independence to each of our 48 states than to sur- render U. S. sovereignty to a world organization.
Regular Features
As the table of contents indicates, NATIONAL REVIEW will consist in part of departments. The idea is to cover various fields systematically, and to encourage a liaison of sorts between the readers and a single expert on the field.
Mr. Jones, for example, will write a Washington in- telligence column every week. Mr. L. Brent Bozell will write a piece about trends—attitudes, legislation, policy in the making, from Washington, every week. Mr. Kendall will write weekly on the Liberal Line. The purpose of this column is explained on page 8.
We deeply regret that Mr. Schlamm is ill. Beginning with the third issue, he will undertake to write a weekly column on “Foreign Trends,” and also a weekly column on “Arts and Manners.” Mr. Ryskind will write the arts column every fourth week.
Every fortnight, C.B.R. will explore the activities of domestic Communists, fellow travellers and dupes. His column will alternate with a column by Miss Freda Utley, on the figure the United States is cutting abroad. Every fourth week Mr. Frank Meyer will devote his attention to the academic journals.
Mr. Mitchell will write alternately on labor and business. Mr. Burnham will write on “The Third World War,” a weekly column which will examine specific developments in the cold war, and changes in the balance of power.
Mr. Karl Hess will write every other week about the delinquencies of the Liberal press. Mr. Russell Kirk will write about doings in the academic stratosphere every other week, alternating with Mr. Buckley, on activities in the world of education.
We shall publish periodically news coming to us through a special correspondent about happenings behind the Iron Curtain. Mr. F. A. Voigt will write regularly from London. Every fourth issue we will run the column “The Law of the Land.” This week it is written by Mr. C. D. Williams. We will publish, also, a regular column on the United Nations.
Mr. John Chamberlain will write the lead review every other week.
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a ULELES - a - nd **It is inconceivable,” said Lenin, “that communism of and democracy can exist side by side in this world. — | Inevitabl ish.” da nevitably one must perish. ad. his Too many people forget — because they want to forget — this basic rule of communism. The communists do not forget. The nd writings of Marx, Lenin and Stalin are still communist law. rld There is no compromise . .. no middle ground . .. no ific enduring “coexistence.” the How long communism can live, no one knows. Freedom the will never die. Its leaders will long outlive communism’s irk he “unholy three.” Tyranny always causes its own destruction. ere on —e Sor BAAS es J JAsticcaxe ot acres rite areas GOVERNMENT vill eek ish, The GRAY Manufacturing Company, <r 1, Conn. iew
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The Liberal Line...
The Liberal propaganda machine over the past week has stressed:
1, The President’s health. Day by day in every way it gets better and better.
2. The domestic political situation. The question is, whom are the Demo- crats going to run for President?
3. The character of the leaders of the Soviet Union. They are wicked men, the Geneva Spirit and the New Look to the contrary notwithstanding, as one can plainly see from their current be- havior in the Middle East.
4. The crisis in the Middle East. It is grave in the extreme.
5. The Eisenhower Administration’s foreign economic policy. They are pikers about foreign spending.
Number One and Number Two add up to what we may call a wheel- spinning operation, which is something any propaganda machine worth its salt must know how to conduct successful-
. ly. Such an operation is needed when the machine finds itself up against a great event whose consequences are still uncertain (in this case the Presi- dent’s heart attack). Wheel-spinning is also in order when considerations of discretion or of good taste render in- advisable any direct reference to what the machine would like to be talking about (in this case, clearly, the urgent need of forcing the Republicans to nominate, as usual, a dependable anti- Republican Republican), or when the themes it yearns to plug away at might subsequently lay it open to the unbear- able charge that it has been wrong about something, or misread the course of events.
A propaganda machine that is mere- ly spinning its wheels either talks learnedly about everything save what lies closest to its heart, which with the Liberals is always control of the Presi- dency, or hits away at the easy ones, such as delight over the President’s health. Until, therefore, History has jumped one way or the other, so that the machine can adopt appropriate and rewarding themes about the Republi- can nomination, we may confidently ‘expect an uninterrupted flood of
8 NATIONAL REVIEW
WILLMOORE KENDALL
learned talk about this or that irrele- vancy (see, for example, the Alsops’ astonishing Sunday column on the general theory of obsolescence in arm- aments) and endless speculative chat- ter predicated on the notion that the three-cornered race in the Democratic Party really matters.
The important thing is not to be taken in by it, which calls for remem- bering that what the machine is really worried about is the following awful possibility: that the Republican nomi- nation may go to the rather young man who was prematurely anti-Communist, and who may, one day, despite the re- spectable Liberal noises he is now making, kick over the traces and move back in on the Communists, here and abroad.
The themes that relate to the wick- edness of the Soviet leaders and the gravity of the Middle Eastern crisis can likewise be bracketed together as a single operation. The latter repre- sents the Liberal line in its most typi- cal—and by the same token most sin- ister—vein. For the crisis in the Middle East confronts the Liberals with the necessity of devising appropriate and rewarding themes, calculated to shore up a crumbling propaganda position.
Only by urging these self-imposing themes and urging them successfully, can they hope to conceal from the tar- get audience (and from themselves!) the suicidal character of our Liberal- dominated foreign policy.
What the total operation amounts to is, quite simply, this: the United States has for years been upsetting the apple- cart in the Middle East without refer- ence to the consequences for the Arab countries. The Arabs point out that they have only Israel’s word for it that her military build-up is for purely de- fensive purposes. (After all, Israel didn’t even exist ten years ago.) And, that being the case, the day had to come when the Arabs, accepting help from whatever source might be available, would move to restore the status quo ante. And when the Soviet Union, ever alert to opportunities for putting U.S. policy over a barrel, would facilitate such a move. The third theme, em- phasizing that the Soviet leaders have given us further evidence of their wickedness, is worth the Liberals’ in- sisting on, then. because it provides an explanation for the “crisis’ that leaves our planners and their apologists look- ing pretty good after all.
Absurd? Ah, but this column does not invent the Liberal line. It merely reports it.
As for Number Five (the Eisenhow- er Administration are being pikers about foreign economic aid), watch it. Both the Alsops and Walter Lippmann gave it a preliminary workout last week. I predict for it a brilliant future.
Liberal Line.
The Editors of National Review Believe:
1. That there is a Liberal point of view on national and world affairs, for which the word “Liberal” has been appropriated;
2. That the point of view consists, on the one hand, of a distinctively Liberal way of looking at and grasping political reality, and on the other hand of a distinctively Liberal set of values and goals;
3. That the nation’s leading opinion-makers for the most part share the Liberal point of view, try indefatigably to inculcate it in their readers’ minds, and to that end employ the techniques of propaganda;
4. That we may properly speak of them as a huge propaganda machine, engaged in a major, sustained assault upon the sanity, and upon the pru- dence and the morality of the American people—its sanity, because the political reality of which they speak is a dream world that nowhere exists, its prudence and morality because their values and goals are in sharpest conflict with the goals and values appropriate to the American tradition; 5. That NATIONAL REVIEW must keep a watchful eye on the day-to-day operations of the Liberal propaganda machine: the theses it puts forward, the arguments (if any) it advances in their support, and the (implicit or explicit) policy recommendations it urges on us—in a word, on the
Peace—with Honor
WILLIAM F. KNOWLAND
The Republican Senate Leader writes off the present
approach to disarmament as unrealistic, and warns
that U.S. participation in a European nonaggression
pact would become a campaign issue in 1956
The year 1955 will cast a long shadow over the campaign of 1956 and the years beyond. It has produced (and at this writing is still producing) devel- opments of profound significance to the future course of U.S.-Soviet rela- tions—that is to say, to the whole fu- ture course of history. It is of the first importance that these developments ve clearly understood, if discussion is to be concerned with reality.
The wave of relief and optimism which has swept the world since the Summit Conference at Geneva can, if we are not completely honest and realistic with ourselves, undermine the moral position of the Western world. It is important to bear in mind, as President Eisenhower warned in his speech of August 24, 1955, at Philadel- phia, that the good faith of the Krem- lin is to be judged by deeds rather than smiles or Soviet phrases.
After the Geneva Conference I re- ceived a letter from a man who for years was in the foreign service of the Lithuanian Government. He sounded a timely note of warning:
The smile of the Kremlin oli- garchy is ominous—it might fool and enchant many innocent West- erners. Similar tactics were used by the Kremlin in 1939 with the rep- resentatives of the Baltic states in connection with the Mutual Assist- ance Pacts and military bases. Even Stalin smiled and patted the Depu- ty Prime Minister of Lithuania on the back, stating that Lithuanian independence, territorial inviola- bility and non-intervention was as- sured by the friendly Soviet Gov- ernment. He even promised to bridle local Communists, should they make any trouble in Lithu- ania. This man came back from Moscow elated and convinced of the Kremlin’s sincerity, being un- aware of the fact that Moscow and Berlin had already decided to par- tition Lithuania. The same man was murdered by the Soviets in 1941.
We shall do well to remember this sinister glimpse into the history of a captive nation, for the men who smiled at Geneva were Stalin’s men. He chose them, trained them, brought them to power. They were pleasant—yet all the basic causes of tension that ex- isted before Geneva remained, to con- front Secretary Dulles and the For- eign Ministers of France and Great Britain at the current Geneva meet- ing. Let us, therefore, not be deluded by the present Soviet tactic of “friend- liness,” which is due not to any change of heart but to Western defensive strength, and is subject to change without notice. Let us instead consider Soviet strategy, which is constant.
Soviet strategy is aimed at the con- quest of the world for communism. It is a strategy of propaganda, decep- tion, aggression or threats of aggres- sion, and internal subversion of free governments.
The Tensions Remain
Since Yalta, the Kremlin has brought some seven hundred million people under its tyranny, the most ferocious the world has ever known. And its pressures on the peoples of the free world are never for one moment re- laxed. Since the Summit Conference at Geneva it has steadily proceeded in the Near East and North Africa ac- cording to the Chinese Communist blueprint which I placed in the Con- gressional Record on April 29, 1954. The Soviet arms only recently sent to Egypt are part of that plan, and so is the Soviet offer to finance Egyptian economic programs. -
In Europe the meeting of. Foreign Ministers is confronted with these causes of tension, which existed be- fore the Summit Conference:
1. Failure of the Soviet Government to agree on an adequate system of in-
spection for either conventional or atomic weapons.
2. Continuation of Soviet subversion of other nations by the International Communist Party Organization through the Cominform.
3. The enslavement of the satellite states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lat- via, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Bul- garia, Albania and Rumania in viola- tion of treaties and international agreements.
4. Soviet failure to agree to free elec- tions for a united and sovereign Germany.
Quite According to Plan
The violation of twenty-five major treaties and agreements during the last twenty years certainly makes questionable the sanctity of any ad- ditional agreements with the Soviet Union. That is why upon my return from a trip to Europe and Asia in 1953 I questioned the idea of a non- aggression pact with the Soviet Union, which Prime Minister Churchill and Adlai Stevenson had suggested earlier that year. It was and still is my opin- ion that there should be no such pact unless and until the Soviet forces are withdrawn from eastern Europe. Otherwise, dress it up as you will, such a pact would amount to con- demning the peoples of that area to perpetual slavery behind the Iron Curtain.
The Kremlin has already succeeded in neutralizing Austria. Its future ef- forts will be directed at neutralizing Yugoslavia (where it has already made progress), the Scandinavian countries, and of course Germany, where its main obstacle is the great prestige of Chan- _ cellor Adenauer.
We, of course, want a free and united Germany, but not at the price of a permanently enslaved Hungary,
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 9
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.
In Asia the basic Communist aims remain:
1. Chinese Communist membership in the United Nations.
2. Capture of the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu.
3. The neutralization of Formosa, followed by its passage into Commu- nist hands.
4. The communization of Korea through the coalition process that proved so successful in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
5. Communization of Southeast Asia.
6. Withdrawal of the United States from our airbase at Okinawa and, by one means or another, the elimination of our mutual defense pacts with Ko- rea, Japan, the Republic of China, the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
The Communists claim that the real- ization of these aims will mean “Asia for the Asians.” In Communist se-
mantics, of course, that means “Asia .
for the Communists” and the step-by- step realization of the Leninist dictum that “the road to Paris is through Peking.” The first step, admission of Communist China to the UN, would be followed by diplomatic, military and other pressures designed to attain all six objectives. The Communists hope that, by the time the 1956 elec- tions are over, the American people will be sufficiently brainwashed to ac- cept this grand appeasement of inter- national communism. And it would be ‘ unwise to be over-optimistic about the recent UN postponement of the issue of seating Communist China; for a number of countries acquiesced in the delay only until after 1956 has passed into history.
The Soviet Union does not and can- not renounce its role as the spearhead for world revolution. Any engagement it enters into with the free world is fraudulent per se. Communists will disarm, Lenin said, “only after we have completely forced down and ex- propriated the bourgeoisie of the whole world.”
Bearing in mind the Communist aim of world conquest, and Mao Tse-tung’s ‘timetable of aggression — Communist conquest of all Asia and most of Africa by 1973 — it becomes quite understandable that Russian proposals for disarmament invariably prove to mean disarmament of the free world.
10 NATIONAL REVIEW
This is as true of Bulganin’s answer of September 19 to President Eisen- hower’s Geneva proposal as it was of the fraudulent disarmament proposals introduced into the UN by the Soviet Union last May 11—proposals designed to render the free world powerless in the face of an enemy which has no respect ‘for its agreements.
Superfluous or Ineffective
International control of disarmament would seem fated to be either super- fluous or ineffective. For either the governments to be controlled want disarmament or they do not. If the Soviet Government honestly desires disarmament, international control would add nothing. If the Kremlin is determined to violate disarmament agreements, its own total control over its vast empire manifestly excludes an effective international control. In other words, only nations whose citizens are free to watch over their government’s performance can reliably enter into in- ternational disarmament agreements. For the presence of a watchful do- mestic opposition is the only realistic guarantee of governmental honesty. In fact, the absolutely indispensable pre- condition for any true settlement of the issues which divide the United States and the Soviet Union is, as I have repeatedly stated, the restoration of the liberties of the Russian people and the oppressed satellite nations.
The chief Soviet objective is to build a neutral wall in eastern Europe ex- tending from Austria through Ger- many to the Scandinavian countries in the north. This, if taken together with the mutual defense pact giving de facto recognition to Communist control over the Baltic states of Lat- via, Lithuania and Estonia and the satellite states of Poland, Czechoslo- vakia, Hungary, Rumania, Albania and Bulgaria, would protect the body of the Communist octopus. At the same time its tentacles would be free to move into the Middle or Far East.
As an example, the full industrial power and unlimited numbers of “vol- unteers” could be put at the disposal of Communist China for her future adventures in Asia without the Soviet Union technically being an aggressor in the sense that planes bearing the markings of that government or troops wearing its uniform had crossed an international frontier.
This “volunteer” technique was used during the Spanish Civil War and more recently during the Korean War, when large numbers of Chinese “vol- unteers” crossed the Yalu River to engage the forces of the United Nations.
The Soviet Union observed how Communist China had apparently as- sured itself of the privileged nature of its sanctuary north of the Yalu River. Are the realistic men of the Kremlin now laying the groundwork for a privileged sanctuary in the heartland of communism, while its satellites and partners are to be free —if indeed not encouraged—to com- mit aggression elsewhere?
We know that Soviet pilots flew MIG planes during the Korean con- flict though the planes had North Ko- rean or Chinese Communist markings.
What will be the status of the pact under discussion if Soviet “volunteer” pilots, along with Chinese Commu- nist associates in bombers and with weapons supplied by the men in the Kremlin, are used in aggression upon free Asian peoples or even upon United States forces and bases in the Far East or elsewhere?
If Soviet-type bombers with Chinese Communist markings commit aggres- sion and penetrate our radar screen in Alaska and Canada, is the sanctu- ary principle to limit our strategic air command to targets on mainland China? The life of our Republic and of the free world may be at stake in the first critical forty-eight hours. Would we once more, as in Korea, be faced with the risk of defeat and be denied the possibility of victory be- cause of the enlarged privileged sanc- tuary out of which men and supplies were being furnished to the Far East- ern ally of the Soviet Union? These issues and proper safeguards need to be thoroughly explored at Geneva and subsequently in the Senate of the United States if and when such a pact is presented for ratification.
The Terms of Struggle
On July 29, when the “Soviet new look” was being enthusiastically praised by wishful thinkers all over the world, I warned the Senate:
Neither we nor the free world must lull ourselves into a “Little Miss Red Riding Hood” belief that because the wolf has put on Grand-
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mother’s cap and nightgown, his teeth are any less sharp or his in- tentions any less menacing.
Less than two months later the wolf bared his teeth and flexed his claws. On September 17, Nikita Krushchev, at a dinner in honor of Grotewohl, Communist Premier of East Ger- many, addressed these words to the non-Communist newsmen and diplo- mats present:
If you think your capitalistic sys- tem is capable of doing something, let us compete. We will show you. We are not dependent upon your love or hate. We go our own way. There are no obstacles. Victory is ours.
He then made this significant state- ment:
Anybody who takes our smile for withdrawal from the teachings of Karl Marx or Lenin is making a mistake. Those who expect this will have to wait until Easter Monday falls on Tuesday.
In the dialectics of communism this declaration, made by the highest So- viet authority, means that we are in neither for a period of “peace with honor” nor for an end of tensions. It means that the struggle for the world will continue, and not by the stand- ards of civilized nations which recog- nize a responsibility to God and hu- manity, but by the tooth, claw and fang standards of Marx and Lenin. It means that to cheat, lie and murder, to violate treaties and to destroy free nations is still the policy of the So- viet rulers, justified in their eyes by their infamous slogan, “The end justi- fies the means.”
There is an answer to this challenge. It is incorporated in the Republican platform of 1952:
The Government of the United States under Republican leader- ship, will repudiate all commit- ments contained in secret under- standings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslave- ments. It will be made clear, on the highest authority of the President and the Congress, that United States policy, as-one of its peaceful purposes, looks happily forward to the genuine independence of those captive peoples.
We shall again make liberty into a beacon light of hope that will penetrate the dark places. That program will give the Voice of America a real function. It will mark the end of the negative, fu- tile and immoral policy of “contain- ment” which abandons countless
“Spirit of Geneva, Are You There?”
human beings to a despotism and Godless terrorism, which in turn, enables the rulers to forge the cap- tives into a weapon for our de- struction.
The policies we espouse will re- vive the contagious, liberating in- fluences which are inherent in freedom. They will inevitably set up strains and stresses within the captive world which will make the rulers impotent to continue in their monstrous ways, and mark the be- ginning of their end.
As a Senator of the United States, and as Republican Floor Leader in the Senate, I believed then and still be- lieve that this platform pledge was a solemn covenant with the American people, not mere campaign oratory.
There, in those two statements, you have the confrontation of two worlds, with two irreconcilable faiths. The Kremlin overlords adhere to their Marxist-Leninist belief in ruthless tyranny over the minds and bodies of men. We adhere to our Christian- democratic belief in freedom and humanity. They mean it. We also mean it.
There are those, at home and abroad,
who confuse our present and future.
relations with the Communist world as being tantamount to coexistence or no existence, and the stigma of “war- monger” or “preventive war advocate” is accordingly freely applied to any- one in private or public life who calls
for a firm policy against the Commu- nists.
In my judgment, these individuals, by their actions, are not serving the cause of the free world. There is noth- ing more consistent with American ideals, or inconsistent with the con- cept of preventive war, than a policy that calls for never consenting or agreeing to the immoral tenets of the Communist philosophy, based as it is on terror, subversion and oppression of helpless peoples all over the world.
When the chips are down, Ameri- cans will not compromise freedom with totalitarian tyranny. They will not betray the hopes of the peoples of the enslaved countries for the worth- less word of their brutal Communist masters.
The challenge should be faced boldly and debated forthrightly. If there is to be a change of policy, it should be by deliberate and considered choice of the American people, and not by the diplomatic shell game now contem- plated by people, both at home and abroad, who have not yet learned the lesson of Munich, that “the road to appeasement is not the road to peace —it is only surrender on the install- ment plan.”
No political party and no candidate will be able to evade or suppress such an issue in 1956.
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 11
NATIONAL TRENDS
It looks as though the Republican Party’s right wing will muff its big chance. Mr. Eisenhower’s tragic illness has had a number of consequences, one of which was to give a new lease to Republican conservatives. Last sum- mer this group was finished as an im- portant political force—and knew it. But now trepidation and misguided notions about what constitutes “good taste,” keep them from exploiting their advantage.
The momentary immobilization of Republican Liberals furthers the ad- vantage of the conservatives. Until Mr. Eisenhower definitely pulls himself out of the race, the Liberals cannot declare for and promote a candidate. And since the President, apparently, will not an- nounce his intentions until after the first of the year, potential challengers have two months, probably more, to get their campaigns on the road.
Right-wing organization leaders are trying to interest conservatives in the possibility of a coalition campaign for the Presidency, to start late this fall. Senator Knowland, according to the plan, would act as the titular standard- bearer—on the understanding that the coalition’s final selection will not be made until the convention. Knowland’s immediate task would be to capture the all-important California primary, to enter the Oregon primary, and per- haps Minnesota’s. McCarthy’s assign- ment: Wisconsin, Nebraska, New Jer- sey and, tentatively, Massachusetts. With Dirksen, Bricker and Bridges running as favorite sons, politicians believe the coalition could look for- ward to arriving in San Francisco with 250 primary-state votes. Knowland would seek the balance of power from convention - selected delegates, con- centrating on the South, Midwest and West.
Partners to the coalition are hesitat- ing—partly because a declaration this early would be interpreted as anti- Eisenhower and, under the circum- stances, indecently so; and partly be- cause none of them is particularly op- timistic, all things considered, about the coalition’s chances of nosing out the
12.
NATIONAL REVIEW
L.BRENT BOZELL
White House choice. This reticence is being shrewdly exploited by the Lib- erals, who are now confident of being able to name the successor in their own good time.
The Liberal hierarchy is worried by only one man—the Vice President. Mr. Nixon can, and probably will soon, begin to promote his candidacy in a way that will make it hard to distin- guish running for office from perform- ing orthodox Vice-Presidential public relations duties.
Nixon’s position is a strong one. He can remain, in the public eye, a mem- ber of the Eisenhower team yet emerge, in the circumstances, the only refuge for a disgruntled and disorganized Right.
The government security program is in serious trouble. There is a realistic possibility that in the years ahead no security risk can be fired from a gov- ernment job except after a hearing at which the suspect is given the pro- cedural privileges that are guaranteed in criminal trials. The Liberals’ anti- security campaign is not only making headway in the courts, but in Congress —for years the headquarters of tough security sentiment.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the John Peters case, while it skirted a number of security issues, was a clear harbinger of the program’s demise. The Court’s eagerness to discuss as a double-jeopardy question the limited issue to which it addressed itself (the then-academic point of whether the government, as it was permitted to do under the Truman program, was en- titled to appeal agency board rulings to a central loyalty board) is fair warn- ing that, when the crucial issues do get considered, the security program will be judged by the manifestly irrelevant standards of criminal jurisprudence. The rationale is the familiar one, that the social and economic punishment visited on the discharged security risk is enough like fine or imprisonment to warrant giving federal employees in- volved in security troubles the same procedural protections extended in criminal trials. To be sure, the more
effective the Liberals are in popular- izing the notion that a discharged se- curity risk is for all intents and pur- poses a convicted criminal, the more the security risk becomes, for all in- tents and purposes, a “convicted crimi- nal”; the harder it becomes, in other words, to persuade the public to look on a security risk determination as unrelated to an affirmative finding of disloyalty.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has now taken the high court’s cue. It has declared unconstitutional Coast Guard Port security regulations be- cause they do not give persons whose loyalty or reliability is questioned the right to confront their accusers. If the Supreme Court upholds this decision, the federal security program will be on its way out. No longer, for example, would it be possible for a concealed agent of the FBI to put the finger on clandestine Communists — unless the government is prepared to reveal his identity.
The anti-security campaign is mak- ing equally important advances in Congress. Nothing very specific was expected to come out of the Hennings Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, so-called. But last week, Sena- tor Hennings confirmed suspicions, harbored by a few, as to what the sub- committee is up to. In a well-advertised speech to the Lawyer’s Association of St. Louis, Hennings, citing his commit- tee’s mandate, roundly denounced just about every important technique for gathering evidence on subversive ac- tivity, notably the use of unidentified undercover agents, and the use of cir- cumstantial evidence (e.g. association with Communists and Communist fronts). Finally, Senator Hennings urged the abandonment of the “reason- able doubt” standard for judging sus- pects, which, he must realize, is the only thing standing between John Stewart Service, John Paton Davies, Esther Brunauer, and dozens of other prominent risk cases, and important desks in the State Department.
The subcommittee’s activities grew out of the combined lobbying efforts of a few powerful groups. The dissolution of the security program is a triumph for the Fund for the Republic, Amer- icans for Democratic Action and the American Civil Liberties Union, all of which have been in almost daily con- tact with Senator Hennings and the subcommittee staff.
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How to Raise Money in the Ivy League
If you want the old (and young) grads to go over
the top for Alma Mater, just present them, as did
this Smith alumna, with documented proof that the
Best College in the World harbors pink professors
Some morning last month, each of several million Americans refilled his coffee cup, lit his second cigarette and opened, without enthusiasm, a letter from his Alma Mater.
“Dear Fellow-Grad,” the letter probably began. “Do you realize that our contributions account for 80 per cent of ALL THE SCHOLARSHIPS our col- lege offers to deserving high school students?” Or perhaps: “Did you know that our Physics Building has long been OVERCROWDED, UNDER- EQUIPPED and in desperate need of a STUDENT SMOKING ROOM?” If the let- ter came from a woman’s college, it almost certainly asked: “Do you remember: the October gold of the elm by College Hall; the faint blue haze from the piles of leaves burning on Appletree Lane? Can you still hear the twilight sound of the col- lege carillon? We hate to intrude Need on Nostalgia but .. . How MUCH ARE YOUR MEMORIES WORTH TO You?”
Each of several million Americans stopped reading right there, remind- ing himself to remind himself to send $10 (if a man) or $5 (if a woman) to the Best College in the World. A lot of them even will.
Several thousand Alumni Fund Presidents, who have been hoping, this year at least, for $25 (from a man) or $10 (from a woman) will, upon receipt of Fellow-Grad’s check, weep and wail and gnash their teeth and consign to outer darkness this latest of a long series of appeals that failed.
All, however, may not be lost; the Class Goal may yet be met. For to any university—and the chances are doubled in the Ivy League—may come the unbelievable stroke of good luck which smote Smith College in the spring of 1954: the stroke which broke all previous records of alum- nae contributions.
The day the gods smiled on Smith was the day a number of her grad- uates received a letter from me. The letter was three paragraphs long and, even as other fund-raising let- ters, dealt with conditions at Alma Mater. The response to my letter (and I shall present documented evi- dence) was not simply electric—it was atomic. According to the Spring 1954 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly:
In the ten days following Feb- ruary 25 [the day my letter was received] both the President’s Of- fice and the Alumnae House were inundated with letters, telegrams and telephone calls from alumnae. Many of the letters included checks ranging from $1.00 to $1,000. A goodly proportion came from alum-
wr wo
ALOISE HEATH
nae who had already contributed to the Alumnae Fund this year, and a considerable number from alumnae who had never before contributed in any way to the Col- lege. Several letters and checks were sent by men whose alumnae wives during their lifetimes had been contributors.
And this was only the beginning. A Hartford newspaper reported that the town of Northampton had had to assign extra postmen to the college, and that students were being pressed into service as clerks in the treasur- er’s office to handle the deluge of cash, checks and, presumably, old family silver which arrived every quarter hour on the quarter hour from loyal Smith alumnae. In less than three months, the world’s largest women’s college received more money than had ever been collected in any full year in its history.
The Loyal 28,000
The year 1955 may—God help us all—some day be known as the year of the $64,000 question. Like the television program, the letter I wrote to the alumnae of Smith College revolved around a single question; but my question, even unanswered, turned out to be worth almost four times as much as Hal March’s. My question concerned not student scholarships, not faculty salaries, not university equipment, not even Bright College Years. My question concerned the documented Commu- nist-front affiliations of Smith faculty members who help form the opinions of two thousand young minds every year; two thousand young minds which come to college eager, open and, for the most part, blank. “Wine maketh merry, but money answereth all things.” The alumnae of Smith Col-
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 13
lege, with or without the influence of wine, answered my letter with two hundred and eighty-four thousand, eight hundred and thirteen dollars, plus twenty-four cents. An er from the college administration was never given to and, in fact, was never requested nor required by almost 28,000 of the certifiedly educated women of the United States.!
To College Treasurers, Alumni Contributions Chairmen, the John Price Jones Company, American Universities, Inc., and all other pro- fessional or amateur fund-raising or- ganizations, I offer the secret of my success. The process is simple and the fruits are sweet. The formula: Point to Pink Professors. The imme- diate effect (to write as colorfully as possible) is that the administra- tion turns purple and the alumni see red, but in a matter of days the tumult and the shouting die under the cool green whisper of thousands of dollar bills.
The letter which, to Smith, was worth roughly $2,000 a word was described in its full horror by the Smith Quarterly:
The letter began “Dear Alumna.” It suggested that contributions to causes or institutions implied moral responsibility on the part of the donors. It questioned whether con- tributors to Smith wished to “sponsor the employment of men and women who, through their teaching positions, may be influ- encing young minds in a direction contrary to the philosophical prin- ciples in which most of us believe.”
letter then named five mem- bers of the Smith faculty who, “to- ether with other members .
ve been or are presently associ- ated with many organizations cited as Communist or Communist-front by the Attorney General of the United States and the Committee on Un-American Activities.” The letter concluded with the sugges- tion that the alumna who could not conscientiously help to make the employment of such teachers pos- sible should withhold contributions ‘until the Smith Administration explains its educational policy to her personal satisfaction.”
In one small matter, the Quarterly misquoted me. I began my letter not, “Dear Alumna,” but “Dear Fellow Alumna,” and the word “fellow” ‘For seme reason, Smith does not include in her take for 1954 the donation referred to by the alumna who wrote me that “to affirm our faith in Smith College, ny mother ('22)
has just contributed for a new dormitory.”
14
NATIONAL REVIEW
was not to be sneered at in terms of its cash value to Smith College. “To be addressed by you as a ‘fellow alumna’ makes me so ashamed I am doubling my contribution,” one of my correspondents informed me. “I had hopefully supposed,” hopefully supposed another woman, “that to warrant the title of ‘a Smith alumna’ one must cherish the principles of intellectual freedom, due process [sic] and individual integrity. I have today forwarded a cheque...” Among hundreds of unsolicited donors was one who, referring to my letter, asked reproachfully: “If the graduates of an independent liberal arts college do not know better, who does?” (The question is hazy, but the answer, I think, is clearly people who are not graduates of an inde- pendent liberal arts college.)
A spokesman for the sensitive-soul group wrote that she was increasing her contribution though “never again will I hold my head quite so proudly, knowing that you are, indeed, a ‘fellow alumna.’” This reference to posture, incidentally, was repeated so frequently and in so many varia- tions that I can only conclude it has become a nation-wide mark of rec- ognition. In any large congregation of women, look around: those with heads unbloody but bowed are Smith graduates. (Except me; I’m the one hemorrhaging in the corner.)
The Disloyal Two
The success of the Point to Pink Professors technique in fund-raising is, then, demonstrably enhanced if the Pointer be a graduate of the col- lege in question. To find such a Pointer is of course difficult but, even in the Ivy League, not im- possible. President Wright of Smith College openly admitted that among his 28,000 alumnae there were a dis- loyal two who had asked for the basis of the information I offered.
The “Shame on You” reaction, however, is only one approach to an indignant alumnus’ pocketbook. According to my files—and I am sure it is unnecessary to state that my *phone lines, telegraph operator and postmen were just as busy as Smith’s —there is also an inordinately large and vocal minority which belongs to what might be called the Nausea, or Pepto-Bismol School. This group
expresses displeasure not only by bowing its head, but by losing its breakfast in the process. Folding money seems to be used by the sorority as an alkalizing agent. “Your insinuations are nauseous,” one woman wrote greenly; “I shall con- tribute heavily to Smith College.” Another increased her donation be- cause “your shameful behavior to- wards Smith College frankly turns my stomach.” And again: “Your out- rageous letter made me ill—literally ill . . . sending $100 over and above .. .”
Let it not be thought, however, that the P. to P. P. technique in- stitutes only an emotional or physical reaction in the average college grad- uate. Larger by far and even more fluent, though perhaps not quite so rich, was the group which, after reading my letter, contributed to Smith for intellectual reasons. Upon hearing that their money helped to pay teachers who, according to the Government of the United States, had pro-Communist records, the In- tellectuals rushed in a body to the bank.
“My loyalty to the College and my faith in its officers are stimu- lated as never before; I am sending today a check doubling my largest previous contribution,” wrote one. A 1929 graduate, who described her- self as a “student, member of the Administrative staff for three years, and currently member of the Board of Directors of the Alumnae Asso- ciation,” informed me that “your letter has deepened my loyalty to the College more than any single event I could have imagined.” (And yet, earthquake, fire and flood are, conceivably, not beyond the scope of her imagination.)
Another intellectual-type note dis- closed the fact that “though I know only one of the faculty members you mentioned, I judge [apparently from the information I had offered] that all of them are very good teachers who can stimulate the students at Smith College.” One of many “duplicate check” senders owes to me the decision that her Alma Mater is Great. “Because,” as she pithily put it, “it is always the great in- stitutions of learning that are at- tacked first in any police state, for the colleges harbor the ‘dangerous’ people, the people who know how
id-
ter
est
at
to think, whose minds are free.” (One of the extra little rays of sun- shine in my campaign was the fact that I enabled Smith’s President to reach the same conclusion. “If I ever had any doubts about the vi- tality of the liberal tradition in Smith College,” he confided to the student body, “. . . they have been resolved. . . . These letters have in- dicated to me that in the past Smith College has been a very great liberal college.”
It was in this same speech that the President announced triumphantly that only two of 28,000 alumnae, trained to search for truth with a Liberal’s curiosity, had asked for the basis of what he called “these vague charges and insinuations.”’)
A Gift for Words
Others of the Bluestocking Group —all of whom have a real gift for words—sent contributi as to Smith College in defense of “the American tradition,” “the brotherhood of man,” “academic freedom,” and “the Chris- tian way of life.” All of these at- tributes being clearly embodied in five little professors—four-fifths of an attribute per.
I should like to state at this point that, in the interest of academic accuracy, I have ruthlessly excluded from my Intellectual Group even the most fluent of the one hundred and ten ladies who expressed their “con- fidance” in Smith College. I have also excluded a high-minded and wealthy graduate who declared that “Senator McCarthy would have prof- itted from the education I recieved at Smith.”
Pointing to Pink Professors does not, appearances to the contrary not- withstanding, invariably arouse hos- tility to the Pointer on the part of the Pointee. In some Pointees (even the one who described herself as “not Catholic or Jewish or anything else subversive”) my letter aroused a spirit of Christian charity. Sev- eral expressed pity for my “tor- tured, twisted mind”; several ex- cused me on the ground that I was a frustrated female (“You, madam, are a frustrated female!”); many urged me to place myself and my family in the hands of a good psy- chiatrist, and one asked if I had “tried God.”
And then there were the thank- you notes. “I have doubled my usual contribution . . . thank you for spur- ring me on,” wrote a member of the class of ’93. “You have inadvertently done Smith a great favor,” admitted an undergraduate. “There has never been so much money contributed as this year,” wrote a grateful lady who, in the circumstances, can hard- ly have been sincere when she added: “Oh, dear, it would have been so nice if only you had gone to Vassar.”
Even as mold gave rise to penicil- lin, one particular letter developed Heath’s Law of Fund-Raising. “Dear Mrs. Heath,” ran this billet-doux, “Congratulations on your novel (if unethical) method of raising money for our Alumnae Fund. The funds are pouring in, thanks to your letter. Next year you might think up an- other Smear-Smith stunt to aid the Fund.”
Punchdrunk as I was, this letter snapped into focus the whole Smith episode. Derogatory information about Smith equals Smear-Smith equals unprecedented financial sup- port for Smith. If, this year, Smith College were to double its quota of
faculty members whose extracur- ricular activities figured prominently on the Attorney General’s Commu- nist-front list, I could, by pointing out these associations, institute an- other “Smear-Smith” campaign which would double even the 1954 record of alumnae contributions. If Smith tripled its quota, the alumnae would presumably triple theirs.
Although I cannot claim to know what makes the Ivy League graduate tick, I feel I can present incontro- vertible evidence as to what makes him give; and my formula, which cannot but constitute a valuable ad-
_ dition to the psychology of merchan-
dising, I here offer without mental or financial reservation. To Point to Pink Professors is to institute an alumni reaction as predictable as pushing the bellybutton of a mama doll—except that in Ivy League alumni, the eructation takes the form of cash.
The late Mrs. Thomas Lamont gave a million dollars to Sniith and her son Corliss to Columbia. Any fund- raiser with a keen eye for poten- tialities can see that Columbia may easily have got the best of the bargain.
News.
as follows:
The Darzi Gang
To the first person submitting a correct answer to this puzzle, in a letter postmarked from anywhere in Virginia, NATIONAL REVIEW will send a long-playing, twelve-inch record of flamenco guitar music, played by Lopez Tejera, called “Las Penas y Alegrias de Andalusia. The solution will appear next week.
When Chief of Police Snooper was hunting for the Darzi gang, he learned, unknown to the gang, that they were in the habit of commu- nicating with one another by means of code messages in the press, each message having an “introducer” in the personals column of the Sunday Not long after learning of this, he noticed the following in the News: DARZI. TELEGRAPH TOMORROW. SCHEINMALT.
But on looking through the advertisements of the Telegraph of the fol- lowing day, the only entry that he could find apparently in code was UVVROO WWOQWK AMGYUD QPSKWQ PQOWDZ EAMIUY YPQSWE QSMELO
Was this a Darzi message? If so, what did it say?
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 15
The Geneva Blues
Ninety-five per cent of the newspapers and magazines of Europe have been all-out for coexistence, the spirit of Geneva, the détente—what the French like to call “the dialogue between East and West.” But few of them have seemed very happy about it.
The current Geneva conference was ushered in by a thousand apologetic, gloomy and foreboding editorials from every city of Europe. “Don’t expect any results from Geneva,” the editors told their readers. “Abandon hope,” they urgently advised, perhaps forget- ting just what gate it was that boasted that inscription.
After the first day of talks, the Lon- don Sunday Times commented: the “deadlock that everyone foresaw has been firmly established”; and further reflected that the prolongation of the conference as a propaganda platform “is certainly in Russia’s interest rather than the West’s.”
Even the press that has been most receptive to the views of Moscow struck the Cassandra note. Paris’ le Monde felt it necessary to say in heac- lines: “Molotov’s Attitude at Geneva Scarcely Encourages Optimism” — which, from Le Monde, is a ferociously anti-Soviet remark. The German com- mentators, feeling rather outside in any case, gave columns of learned historical example to reinforce their negative expectations.
So far, none of the European editors has gone on to the possibly related question: if all of us in the West agree that this was the outlook for Geneva,
why should we have bothered to go there?
The Delights of Art
For those cynics who declare that smiles and vodka parties are the only tangible backing to Moscow’s coexist- ence campaign, the Communists have an expanding answer. If the West can still count Khrushchev’s political con- cessions on the fingers of one whistling shrimp, the Moscow-directed export of Art and Culture is threatening to swamp European box offices. The latest and most spectacular victory for East-
16 NATIONAL REVIEW
Foreign Trends...w.-s.
West understanding is the “Classical Theater of China,” which, after breach- ing the Continent, has recently opened in London.
Cyril Beaumont found the Chinese company “a superb team,” “superla- tively rehearsed.” “They fascinate and astonish,” the capitalist-imperialist critic added, “with their artistry, ex- pressiveness, invention, and un- quenchable vitality.” The solid old Observer gave “vent to amazement and delight.”
Full, no doubt, of the spirit of Gen- eva, none of the non-Communist cri- tics of the traveling troupes from the East is so rude as to suggest that there might be any political motivation in their appearance at just this time. None even seems to be struck by the odd fact that revolutionary Russia and China are offering as their most at- tractive product the art forms taken over intact from the darkest epochs of their imperial past.
The Communist writers, however, take a broader view. Les Lettres Fran- caises, for example, shows how the bal- let proves the success of the Soviet “nationalities policy,” and allows the reader to draw the easy inference that everyone could have peace and better ballets by just keeping in step with Moscow.
Royauté Oblige
In England Geneva’s early debates played a pale second to the dénoue- ment of the royal romance. As the cli- max approached, the great organs of public opinion became like stylized masks in a Greek play, through which were voiced, as judgments on the plot, the conflicting philosophies of our time. Rationalist, secular, egalitarian, the Left, led by the Manchester Guard- ian and the New Statesman and Na- tion, in embarrassing but inevitable agreement with the Daily Worker, con- demned “outworn prejudice” and “fhe archaic succession act.” Is a princess different from any other young girl? Surely (the argument implied) no young girl—or woman or man—has any other standard than to gratify personal impulse and desire.
Divorce “is not shocking to any sig- nificant section of the British public,” insisted the New Statesman, and clev- erly added: “If the Prime Minister and some of his colleagues . . . can retain office after divorcing their wives, in what way does it matter that the Queen’s sister should be in the same position?”
The Times, after a long silence, gave the conclusion that could not be avoid- ed by a philosophy in which tradition, order, and spirit have an integral part. Margaret could marry only by re- nouncing the throne and her place in the Royal Family, “a group fulfilling innumerable symbolic and representa- tive functions.” If Margaret gives up “her gallant officer,” the Times added, she will discover, in despite of the per- sonal gratification foregone, that “hap- piness in the full sense.is a spiritual state, and that its most precious ele- ment may be a sense of duty done.”
These observations were promptly labeled by the New Statesman as “cant,” “vague and high-falutin’ sen- timent,” “flummery and abracadabra.” But Margaret Rose, who sometimes in the past has seemed rather to exploit than adorn her principate, chose the way of the Church’s teaching and her duty to the Commonwealth; and by the simple words of her public decla- ration she raised her act to the level of honor and tragedy.
Within twenty-four hours, over- whelming popular approval proved how wrong is the Left’s assumption that an instinctive feeling for loyalty and dignity went out with feudalism.
The Face at the Window
West German misgivings over the deal that Herr Adenauer brought back from Moscow were not relieved by the an- nouncement that Valerian Zorin has been appointed first Soviet Ambassa- dor to Bonn. Zorin’s official record shows him as a deputy foreign minister, and chief Soviet delegate to the UN in 1951-2. But some of the German press glumly recalled a more dynamic inci- dent of his career. In February 1948 Zorin was in Prague to superintend the coup by which Czechoslovakia was dragged behind the Iron Curtain. Re- membering the mode of Masaryk’s death in that coup, one German edi- torial suggested that German officials would do well to stand clear of open windows.
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FALSE FACES. Dyed-in-the-wool Reds are now presumably registered and enrolled as honest-to-goodness Democrats and Republicans, follow- ing the latest directive issued by the New York State Communist Party as a model for all U.S. Communists. Tammany leader Carmine De Sapio has already expressed his alarm about this possibility in New York. Politi- cal leaders throughout the nation are on the alert, and suitable preventive legislation is being considered. Those who deem the Communist procedure unusual would do well to observe the same international pattern operating in Brazil, where the illegal Commu- nist Party made a deal to back Jus- celino Kubitschek for President and Joao Goulart for Vice President.
PLAYING BOTH ENDS. While the Soviet satellites furnish arms to Egyp- tian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser against Israel, William Z. Foster, Red gauleiter in the United States, un- blushingly calls upon American Jews to align themselves with the anti-U.S.., pro-Soviet camp. He calls upon Israel to “abandon its pro-imperialist [CP jargon for pro-U.S.] foreign policies and to identify itself with the anti- imperialist [CP jargon for pro-USSR]1 aspirations of the many Asian-African peoples,” and follows with the unmis- takable threat that “Failure to do this can only spell increasing trouble for Israel, now and in the future.”
OVERTHROW OF GOVERNMENT. Simple-minded folk, like our naive Liberals, conceive that the Communist aim to overthrow the U.S. Govern- ment involves primarily storming the walls of the Capitol with force and violence. They have no conception that the Reds have a much more in- sidious design, to which wittingly or unwittingly they often have given substantial aid. That design is to sap the strength of the government from within, to discredit it, to paralyze its functions, to question its authority. Zersetzung is the term given to this process in Soviet psychological war- fare channels. Here are some of the methods now being employed:
1. Character assassination of all anti-
Communist government witnesses so as to make witnesses practically un- available and thus paralyze the ma- chinery of the prosecution.
2. Attacks upon the FBI, the Depart- ment of Justice, the government loy- alty program and Congressional in- vestigating committees. Refusal to testify.
3. Demands that, in accordance with the “spirit of Geneva,” all prosecu- tions of Communists be brought to a halt, and those convicted be released immediately.
4. Appeals by Communist front or- ganizations to the United Nations, by- passing the U.S. Government.
ROSE BY ANY NAME. Discredited and disabled by fire from the Attor- ney General, the Subversive Activi- ties Control Board and a New York State joint legislative investigating committee, the Communist-front Civil Rights Congress has quietly evapo- rated. Its place in the columns of the Communist press has been taken by the so-called Emergency Civil Liber- ties Committee. This organization has not been cited by the Attorney Gen- eral, no doubt due to former Senator Cain’s crusade against the Attorney General’s list. Meanwhile, the Emer- gency Civil Liberties Committee has successfully attracted a new batch of suckers. Count upon them to plead, “Why didn’t somebody tell me?”
BIG BUSINESS GOES SOVIET. With gratification, the Communist press reprints a memorandum sent to all executives of General Motors: “You are authorized to sell non-stra- tegic goods, specifically automobiles, to Soviet Russia and its European satellites.”
And now perhaps some broad- minded corporation can be found that will sell the Reds non-strategic hydro- gen bombs.
ACADEMIC FREEDOM. While Pro-.
fessor Herbert Fuchs has been ousted summarily from the law school facul- ty of American University because he rendered a patriotic service by testi- fying regarding the members and ac- tivities of a Communist group oper-
DETROIT PUBLIC LIBRARY
ating within our government, Owen Lattimore has been reinstated by Johns Hopkins University. Lattimore was characterized by the Senate In- ternal Security Subcommittee as one who was “influential in bringing about a change in the United States policy in 1945 favorable to the Chi- nese Communists.” As a result of this change he advocated, the free world lost the Chinese mainland and thou- sands of Americans died in Korea. Shall we hear from the American As- sociation of University Professors about the miscarriage of academic justice in the case of Professor Fuchs?
CHINA LOBBY. That leading expo- nent of British liberalism, the Man- chester Guardian, has this explana- tion for the Lattimore case: “Mr. Lat- timore was under attack because he has offended the China Lobby.” The Guardian’s writer, Marc T. Greene, adds approvingly, “It is a vendetta— a vendetta between Dr. Lattimore and the evil and nefarious China Lobby, the most powerful of all the Wash- ington lobbies and richly endowed by Chiang Kai-shek out of the money given him by the American Govern- ment as military aid.” No doubt the Guardian and Mr. Greene have copies of the cancelled checks, or is it re- actionary to ask for evidence?
GALLOPING POLLS. On three sepa- rate occasions the Communist Daily Worker has urged its readers to write to the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, U.S. Senate, Washington 25, D.C., for copies of its civil rights ques- tionnaire. It can be expected that the subcommittee will receive a flood of replies from Daily Worker supporters.
JUVENILE DELINQUENCY. Thir- ty-one American youths attended the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Friendship in Communist Warsaw in August as guests of the Soviet Anti- Fascist Youth Committee. Their jour- ney was without any U.S. Govern- ment authorization. To our knowl- edge, the government has taken no action toward this flagrant violation of the law. On the contrary, the Daily Bruin, official campus newspaper at the University of Los Angeles, is lending aid and comfort to the delin- quents by publishing six consecutive articles by George Moore, student leader of the expedition.
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 17
THE LAW OF THE LAND
C. DICKERMAN WILLIAMS
Jury Espionage as Contempt of Court
The jury espionage recently under- taken in the Federal Court at Wichita, Kansas, by the University of Chicago Law School with funds provided by the Ford Foundation has been gener- ally disapproved by public opinion.
The decisions of the courts agree. That the proper administration of jus- tice requires freedom from espionage has been categorically adjudicated by the Supreme Court in a case involv- ing espionage far less intimate than that by the University of Chicago Law School.
In 1927 Harry F. Sinclair, the oil magnate, and Albert F. Fall, former Secretary of the Interior, went on trial for conspiracy in connection with the Teapot Dome lease. The facts of the conspiracy had originally been developed in congressiona! investiga- tions, defended against their critics in scorching language by Justice Felix Frankfurter, then a Professor at the Harvard Law School, in his article descriptively entitled “Hands Off the Investigations!”
Sinclair engaged the Burns Detec- tive Agency to shadow the jurors at all times when out of the courtroom. His alleged purpose was to make sure that the Government side was not talking to the jurors. Sinclair’s detec- tives at no time made any contact with a juror.
Sentence Upheld
The Supreme Court unanimously pronounced Sinclair’s action an “odi- ous thing.” A lower tribunal had sen- tenced Sinclair to a term of six months in prison for contempt of court, and this sentence was upheld. The Court said:
That the acts here disclosed .. . tended to obstruct the honest and fair administration of justice we cannot doubt. The jury is an essen- tial instrumentality—an appendage —of the court, the body ordained to pass upon guilt or innocence. Exer- cise of calm and informed judgment by its members is essential to prop-
18 NATIONAL REVIEW
er enforcement of the law. The most exemplary resent having their foot- steps dogged by private detectives. The mere suspicion that he, his family and friends are being sub- jected to surveillance by such per- sons is enough to destroy the equi- librium of the average juror and render impossible the exercise of calm judgment upon patient consid- eration ... There was probable in- terference with an appendage of the court while in actual operation; the inevitable tendency was towards evil, the destruction, indeed, of trial by jury.
A few years later the Supreme Court again had occasion to consider the sanctity of jury deliberation. The case was a prosecution of a juror named Clark for contempt of court for misleading answers during her ques- tioning. She had failed to reveal close connections with the defendant in a criminal case for which the jury was being chosen; had been accepted as a juror, and alone among the jurors had insisted upon the defendant’s ac- quittal, thereby causing a mistrial. The Supreme Court had to decide whether evidence of her arguments and votes in the jury room was admissible. The Court said that, “Freedom of debate might be stifled and independence of thought checked if jurors were made to feel that their arguments and bal- lots were to be freely published to the world.”
The Court’s conclusion was, how- ever, that if there were a prima facie showing of dishonesty in the selection of a juror, “the debates and ballots in the jury room are admissible as cor- roborative evidence, supplementing and confirming the case that would exist without them.” The juror’s con- viction for contempt of court was af- firmed.
But in the Clark case there was no suggestion that tape recording would be authorized. The discussions in the jury room were established by or- derly inquiry. In short, the unfortu- nate juries spied on by the University of Chicago were subjected to treat- ment more humiliating than that per-
missible when there is probable cause to believe that one or more jurors are corrupt.
The rationale of these and similar decisions is the necessity that jurors function freely and without self-con- sciousness. Plainly this would be im- possible if jurors felt they might be watched or overheard. In fact it is difficult to conceive what could more completely destroy that “calm judg- ment,” “serenity of mind,” “freedom of debate,” and “independence of thought”—all said by the Supreme Court to be indispensable to the proper performance of the juror’s function— than realization that their remarks might be broadcast to the world as if their discharge of a public duty con- stituted an interesting experiment in animal husbandry.
The Guinea Pig Concept
The attitude of the Chicago profes- sors is another example of that unfor- tunate concept of human beings as guinea pigs to supply scientific data for “planning.” Thus the slaughter and exile of millions of peasants in connection with the Soviet farm col- lectivization program was justified by a category of American intellectuals on the theory that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” In the present instance these legal scientists were apparently prepared to demor- alize the existing jury system in the vague hope that doing so - might make some kind of contribution to a better one.
That the conduct of the Chicago pro- fessors constituted contempt of court apart from the consent of the presid- ing judge, is clear. The fact of that consent presents interesting questions. Are the professors thereby relieved of liability? Is the judge subject to disciplinary measures? Undoubtedly the professors are protected if the judge granted permission in the exer- cise of a judicial function, even if he committed a legal error in so doing. But no protection is provided by the order of a judge who acts without authority.
A United States judge has “super- intendence” of a jury trial, to borrow a word used by the Supreme Court in a well-known case. But in giving the detail of what constituted “superin- tendence,” the Court spoke of “atten-
(Continued on p. 23)
LABOR...
JONATHAN MITCHELL
In the North African campaigns of World War Two, Marshal Montgomery kept a photograph of Rommel in his trailer. He used to tell visitors that what was important was not the Ger- man armor, but the mind of its com- mander.
One of the most fascinating Ameri- can minds is that of Mr. Walter Reu- ther, head of the United Automobile Workers. It is as aggressive as Rom- mel’s, filled with towering thoughts. Recent ones, according to its owner, have been about the 1956 Democratic convention, automation and a United Nations settlement in the Near East.
It may also— now six weeks ago— havé had thoughts of eight persons wounded by gunfire at Newcastle, Indiana, when union partisans marched on the piston-ring foundry of the Perfect Circle Corporation. The soft whine of .22 bullets, happily the largest caliber used on either side, came from a dispute over the union shop, the same cause that has dragged out the UAW strike at the Kohler plumbing factory of Sheboygan, Wis., for nineteen months.
On the day after the shootings, Mr. A. H. Raskin of the New York Times reproved the Perfect Circle manage- ment as a “throwback to the Stone Age.” The Stone Age Mr. Raskin pre- sumably had in mind was the whole life of the Republic up through the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations, during which, contrary to Mr. Ras- kin’s gibe, employers and employees were often on genial terms. But Mr. Raskin was correct in thinking that the individual’s right to work has now ceased to be held of value, and com- panies like Perfect Circle and Kohler are embarrassingly out of fashion.
The principal evidence on whether thoughts about Perfect Circle moved through Mr. Reuther’s brightly pol- ished and highly channeled mind is a statement by Mr. W. F. Caldwell, the UAW representative at Newcastle, to his followers: “Reuther is in daily contact.” Possibly a morale-building statement; possibly the fact.
But whoever of the UAW’s upper hierarchy was in charge would have
known, back when the strike was called on July 25, that it would be a difficult one. The Perfect Circle man- agement had made no secret of its hostility to the union shop. Much more important for Mr. Reuther’s book, the majority of the local UAW members made no secret of their disinclination to sit out a long strike. Perfect Circle runs four plants in the Newcastle area. On three of them the strike has yet to have appreciable effect.
Faced by this thorny prospect, the UAW might understandably have sought such momentary terms as it could get—the company was offering an ll-cent pay raise and the UAW asking for a 21-cent package—and en- deavored to build up union-shop sen- timent among its members. Unless, of course, the UAW higher-ups had felt they needed a show strike. As a show strike, Perfect Circle had two gaudy features. It was owned by the Teetor family, the head of which, Lothair, was then an Assistant Secretary of Commerce. If events led to the calling out of the Indiana militia, it would have to be called out by Governor George N. Craig, an Administration pet and dark-horse candidate for the 1956 Republican nomination.
Whatever Mr. Reuther’s part in call- ing the strike, a group of thoughts that last July were quite certainly making their way through his mind were those having to do with the merger of the CIO and AFL. These would have been bluish-colored thoughts, the reason being partly that Mr. David MacDonald, head of the CIO’s second largest union, the United Steelworkers, had already made his own arrangements with certain AFL leaders. Mr. Reuther did not have the CiO, as an entity, behind him.
This uncomfortable situation had ex- isted for some time, and great men fall under the Toynbeean principle of challenge and response. The weakness of the CIO had been Mr. Reuther’s challenge; his response early last spring—three months before the Per- fect Circle strike—had been the Guar- anteed Annual Wage. In the combined AFL-CIO, if Mr. Reuther could not
be the most powerful leader, he meant to be the most-advertised one.
GAW will be gone into later (adv’t) in this space. Here it is enough to say that Ford’s industrial relations de- partment turned to to give Mr. Reu- ther nearly as much, and as affection- ate, publicity as Princess Margaret’s. But, in the written contract, they held GAW down to a fringe benefit, and, unkindest of all, changed its sanc- tified initials to SUP, or “supplemen- tary unemployment payments.”
The other two of the Big Three joined in with Ford’s gesture of hats- off-to-Reuther. But his prospective AFL colleagues, who had to explain why they themselves hadn't thought up GAW, called it a phoney.
The toppling of GAW toward the end of July coincided with the Perfect Circle strike. No doubt the two were unrelated. But once called, the Per- fect Circle strike was bound to take on interest. The usefulness of the Kohler strike as a conversation piece had about run out. The Perfect Circle strike was new, and had enticing con- nections with the Administration.
The union shop—the central issue of the Kohler and Perfect Circle strikes — would, in other times, leave the leaders of old-established AFL unions quite calm. In one way or another, their own unions have it. But they are vastly irritated by the recent push toward state “right-to-work” laws, by which the union shop is prohib- ited. They do not doubt their ability to get around them. But, like any group, they feel the laws derogate from their group prestige.
In the Perfect Circle strike, Mr. Reuther apparently has a solid piece of property. When the AFL and CIO hold their parallel conventions next month, preparatory to unification, he will be the sole union leader in a mili- tant posture.
A few days ago, a Newcastle resi- dent tried to explain the town’s for- mer qualified affability toward the UAW, and present bitterness.
“You know how it is in a small town,” he said. “Everybody is either somebody or nobody. So, of course, most everybody is somebody.”
This estimate of the American in- dividual may have passed through Mr. Reuther’s mind, and explain his con- cern for the 1956 conventions and the Washington government. From the top down, it’s easier.
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 19
A Remembrance of Things Past
In the latter part of January 1936, Al- bert Sarraut formed a caretaker gov- ernment to get France through to the general elections scheduled for that spring. George V had just died, and the British Government was immersed in the problems of Edward’s accession. At Geneva the speeches of the Western delegates, lamenting the fight in Ethio- pia, were swamping the League’s mul- tilingual stenographers.
This was the political landscape upon which the Italian and German strate- gists based their calculations. Musso- lini, replacing General de Bono by Badoglio, stepped up the African war to a winning pace. On March 7, a few hours after he had proposed a twenty- five-year peace pact to London and Paris, Hitler, discarding the advice of his generals, ordered 35,000 un- equipped soldiers into the Rhineland.
Pierre-Etienne Flandin, Sarraut’s foreign minister, tells in his book of memoirs (which has unfortunately never been translated) the inner story of the French and British response to Hitler’s move. The issue was placed be- fore the French Supreme Military Council. The Council members de- clared that the army could not act, that France had to wait for England’s deci- sion. The Minister of War added that the manning of the Maginot Line was the only counter-move that had been prepared in advance. Moreover, he and the generals insisted, any positive ac- tion would require general mobiliza- tion. (Hitler’s troops were marching, in fact, with orders to withdraw if they met French resistance.)
This demand for general mobiliza- tion, Flandin notes, “provoked a storm in the Council. ‘General mobilization six weeks before the election! — it’s sheer madness!’ cried a number of my colleagues.”
In the continuing debate, a day or two later, the Socialists held that “in any case, there was no other solution than to refer the issue to the League of Nations and to consult with London.”
20 NATIONAL REVIEW
The THIRD
WORLD WAR
JAMES BURNHAM
As for the center parties, which con- stituted the majority, “they were dis- turbed by the idea that an energetic act by the government might create a threat of war at a time when the senti- ment of the country was pacifist. In short, each and every one thought of the reoccupation of the Rhineland as a complication of domestic politics that might have an effect on the elections. I have never felt a more bitter distaste for electoral cowardice.”
Strategy and Elections
A traditional military commander, in his estimate before committing his forces to a battle or campaign, will never omit consideration of the geo- graphical terrain over which he will have to move and fight. The totalitar- ian strategists of our century have learned to give the same scrupulous care to the political climate and terrain in which they plan to conduct their op- erations. To the strategists of the Kremlin, Hitler’s experiments seemed to confirm a general rule that modern democratic governments become par- alyzed at the approach of elections; or, more accurately, that the energies of democratic governments become so obsessively focused on the inward electoral process that there is no sur- plus energy for positive and effective external action.
In the United States the 1956 election is already in process, troubled and in- tensified by the President’s illness. We can be sure that this outlook was a major determinant of the specific con- tent of the current Soviet tactic — rather more basic, let us say, than the reputed temperamental differences between Khrushchev-Bulganin and Stalin-Beria.
The Geneva spirit as the Kremlin interprets it—that is, smiles as a cover for sharp, undercutting political blows —is admirably fitted to press the juice of an election year. Each political party in a modern democracy must, accord- ing to the Communist reasoning, strive to outdo its rivals in promising the
voters peace and good times. There- fore no party can scorn the proffered smiles or promote an effective counter to the blows. To do either would prove it an Enemy of Peace.
Excuse It While I Cut Your Throat
Six months ago many of our analysts told us that Moscow sought coexistence because she had been thrown on the defensive as a result of the success of our pclicy of containment, her own in- ternal difficulties, and her realization of the cost of nuclear war. Today it is not necessary to underline the error in this judgment.
For Moscow, the policy of election- year coexistence is precisely a renewal of the offensive, and on what Commu- nists would call “a higher plane.” In this round, Moscow is leaping the Eur- asian limits that she has hitherto ob- served. Guaranteed against war by the President’s promise in July, relying on the election neurosis, the Commu- nists launch a rapid series of new and audacious moves.
Jumping over the southeast Asian peninsula, they prepare the absorption of Indonesia 4 la Prague. They fly on their political carpet over the land bridge into North Africa and the southwestern shore of the Mediterra- nean; and while choice elements of the enemy’s forces are there pinned in Morocco and Algeria, they quickly turn to build up Near Eastern step- pingstones through those channels of world force that are left unwatched as the British complete their exodus from Suez. As far away as the eastern bulge of South America, they get ready for actions that are foreshadowed by the coming inauguration of their Brazilian friend, President-elect Juscelino Ku- bitschek. Meanwhile they block uni- fication of Germany on Western terms, hammer at the joints of NATO, and press their wooing of Southeast Asia.
All this, and more, with the election still nearly a year away! Unresisted— and they are being resisted only as Hitler was resisted in 1936—they wil! not quiet down. Rather will their blows increase in boldness and power. The détente is a rhetorical diversion. Egypt is not the last of the election year sur- prises. And while new areas are tested, they will not have forgotten such old favorites as South Vietnam, Formosa and West Germany.
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They'll Never Get Me on That Couch
MORRIE RYSKIND
For an author of Broadway and Hollywood hits to
remain unpsychoanalyzed is to invite the scorn of
the cognoscenti. But what can a poor rebel do?
I guess there’s nothing you can do about your genes. It’s not bad enough that I was a nonconformist in the days of my youth; time is supposed to take care of that, a la measles and mumps. But not me. The reflexes grow weaker with each passing year, and the bifocals stronger, but the same old rebel blood apparently still flows in my otherwise arteriosclerotic veins. How it has managed to sur- vive the pall of conformity (so ably exposed by such smog experts as Henry Commager and Elmer Davis) which covers the intellectual horizon of America today is a mystery, but there you are; I don’t pretend to ex- plain it any more than I can explain Dunninger.
What makes it worse is that I am basically gregarious and crave, more than I care to admit, popularity. It would be wonderful to have people cheering as I enter a room, instead of screaming “Unclean!” and fleeing as though the plague had struck. If they must go (and, alas! they must), why can’t they go quietly?
Not (when you consider the list of my heresies) that you can blame them. As long ago as 1937, I was excommunicated for questioning—in spite of the testimony of Holy Writ as recorded in the Nation and the New Republic—the immaculate con- ception of FDR. The doubts I had about Yalta have not been removed by the recent revelations of the martyred Alger Hiss, who was pres- ent when the miracle was performed, while I was far away in California. I have attended Black Mass meetings for Joe McCarthy, and signed peti- tions for the Bricker Amendment. And once, in the presence of three sworn witnesses, I took a book by Howard Fast and threw it on my log-fire.
Now, obviously, conduct of this nature is not to be condoned. Each
_ group has its laws and its mores and
it cannot view with equanimity— especially if it’s a Liberal group— any constant subversion of said laws and mores (unless, of course, the subversion is of Communist origin, in which case it comes under the head of free speech: cf. Commager, Davis, Joseph Rauh, Dean Griswold, Max Lerner and Lewis Carroll). Various learned posses have been formed to study the subject and, thanks to grants from the more en- lightened tax-free foundations, have been able to make recommendations. Unfortunately, because of postal reg- ulations, most of the recommenda- tions cannot be repeated here; though they are available, if you know the right people, for stag parties. There is, too, a minority report which does not preclude the sterner measures but suggests a thorough psycho- analysis before any vigorous action is taken.
That would seem to be eminently fair, and I don’t say I haven’t been tempted. But even here the genes win out, and again I balk. I remain, I suspect, the only person of either (or no) sex who has written a Broadway show or a Hollywood scenario and has never been psycho- analyzed. And don’t think it hasn’t been lonesome. I used to go to Dramatist Guild meetings to vote, but I could never join in afterward when the boys were talking shop. Now I just mail my vote in.
It isn’t, as some people have un- fairly claimed, the money; some of the shows were hits, and my royal- ties would have covered the analyst’s fees. It isn’t even that I think Freud has little to offer. It’s just—well, a number of things.
For example: at a Hollywood din- ner party some years ago, I was seated next to a female Freudian who inquired brightly, “And what do you do?” Instead of standing on the Fifth Amendment, like a dope I
said I did some writing. “What was your name again?” she asked. I came clean. She repeated my name doubtfully a couple of times, but no bell rang. Then she asked me to spell it for her; but it stil] meant nothing to her (and, by that time, it meant even less to me), so she regretfully shook her head, said “I handle only the big writers,” and turned to the man on her left. Nat- urally, I got out of there as fast as I could and haven’t attended another Hollywood party since. (P. S. I haven’t been asked.)
Being rejected as openly as that could give even stronger men than myself an inferiority complex. Had I been better adjusted, I’d have ~lled the lady up in the morning and asked her how much she would charge to undo the complex she had created. But I was too crushed to reason. I just retreated to the w-mb and nursed my trauma.
Three Years in a Trauma
You nurse a trauma for three years, and you’re going to wind up with a pretty fair-sized trauma, be- lieve you me. Eventually there just wasn’t room for both of us, so I decided to go out into the world again. I was greeted affectionately by my family; the children—after demanding and getting their back allowances, and that can mount up in three years—hugged me, my wife reluctantly dropped the Enoch Arden divorce suit she had instituted, and the dog leaped all over me in sheer ecstasy. I felt loved, honored, needed —I was secure again.
Until, that is, the other night, when we were asked over to the Blanks. The Blanks live right around the corner and are good friends of ours— except during election campaigns. (They voted for Roosevelt the four times his name was on the ballot,
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 21
2
and they write it in now that it no longer appears there.) But, as long as you don’t discuss religion and just stick to bridge, they are as nice a couple as you'd care to meet. How the hell was I to know they had just come into some money and gone in for analysis?
True, I did have some apprehen- sions as we entered, but that was only because I didn’t recognize any of the other guests, and I am shy about strangers. Not sensitive, just shy. But the Blanks greeted us ef- fusively, the butler they had hired for the occasion pressed a martini upon us, and everything seemed hunky-dory. No guardian angel (heretics have none) came to whisper in my ear that the other guests were six assorted psychiatrists and analysts —I know there’s a technical differ- ence, but don’t ask me what—and their wives.
Luckily for me, I was on my third martini before I realized what had happened. I feel thoroughly secure . with two martinis—with three I am invincible. The talk around me swirled with the potty habits and aggressive tendencies of siblings— which is what Freudians have in- stead of children—but I sat and sipped, completely unafraid. I even looked around hopefully for the lady psychiatrist who had induced my original breakdown, because I wanted to tell her a few things I had been thinking up for three years. Give me three years, if I do say so, and I can come across with some witty repartee. But she was nowhere to be seen, the coward.
I comforted myself with the real- ization that my stored-up wise- cracks were too good to waste on one psycho when I could have a dozen of them to appreciate me, and I waited my chance to insert them into the general conversation. But the talk was still of siblings and their unpleasant ways, and on these subjects I had nothing prepared. I bided my time and accepted another martini from the butler, a_ stout fellow who believed in giving an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. This time I took an olive instead of an onion.
They were mighty good olives, too —our own California brand—and I had three or four before I realized that the conversation had finally got
22 NATIONAL REVIEW
around, as it inevitably does here, to the movies. One of the psychi- atrists was holding forth on the psychoanalytical aspects of Olivier’s Hamlet, and I gathered that he ap- proved enthusiastically. I also gath- ered, though he didn’t actually come out and say so, that he wasn’t taken in by any of the idiotic notions that Bacon or Ben Jonson or that Earl of Something-or-Other had written the plays attributed to Shakespeare; he knew who had written them: Sigmund Freud.
Serpents in Eden
Now, as a good heretic, I hold that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and I am normally prepared to give bat- tle for my theory. My wife, who suffers from some strange delusion that I don’t know how to act at parties, rushed over with a martini. I accepted the drink, but she needn’t have worried. Only people with in- feriority complexes have to talk to prove they’re important; and, at the moment, the only thing I was suf- fering from was an exquisite sense of euphoria. In my generous mood, I was even willing to listen to a theory that Rocky Graziano had written the odes of Q.H. Flaccus. One more olive, indeed, and I would have promulgated the theory myself.
Into Eden came the snake, this time in the guise of a psychoanalyst’s wife. She turned to me during a lull and asked whether I had seen the Olivier
LICENSED
Hamlet. My wife was watching me intently, so all I said was “Yes.” My wife beamed. Ah, if that had been the end of it!
But you don’t know Freudians. “And how did you like it?” continued the temptress.
“Very much,” I said, “though I didn’t think it was as good as his Henry V. That, I thought, was bril- liant.”
She showed her fangs. “You mean to say,” she hissed, “you actually preferred his Henry to his Hamlet?” She stopped, but the hissing, strange- ly, continued. I looked around and saw why: other reptiles had taken on where she left off.
I don’t want to overdramatize, but it was a tense moment: a dozen psychoanalysts, fangs and rattles poised, against one man armed only with a clear conscience and maybe ten martinis. This, definitely, was It. I’ve always wondered how I would act at the Final Curtain—pleading and sniveling like a coward, or smil- ing and defiant in the tradition of Nathan Hale and Alan Ladd. Let it be recorded that my boots stayed on. I said, “Yes.”
“Hmph,” snorted the psychobra on my left, “that’s revealing!”
“Very revealing,” the others chor- used, and exchanged knowing looks.
For the first time that evening I was disconcerted. I didn’t know what I had revealed but, from the way they were smiling at each other, I knew it was something good and dirty that
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had come up from my subconscious. But what? A misplaced libido? A ficating id? My whole life passed be- fore me in the twinkling of an eye, and there were some things I didn’t want anybody to know.
My concern must have shown it- self, for a boa constrictor in the corner rose from his chair, unwound himself to his full length (ebout eleven feet, six inches, was my hasty calculation), and pressed his ad- vantage. “And just what didn’t you like about it?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” I replied. “I merely said I thought Henry V was better.”
There were hoots of “emotional in- stability,” “delusions of grandeur,” and “anti-social tendencies.” A lady asp whipped out a notebook and climbed on the lap of a psychopython who immediately began dictating his clinical observations to her.
Not Filial
They were ready for the kill, but I stood my ground. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” I repeated, “but, since you ask me, I was puzzled by the kiss Hamlet gave Gertrude. It wasn’t a filial kiss—it was definitely sexual.”
The others ::ushed, but the tall one continued. “And what’s puzzling about that?”
“Well,” I said, “you don’t kiss your mother like that, do you? Now, if it had been Ophelia, I’d understand. But your own mother!”
“Now that,” said the psychobra who had started the whole thing, “is even more revealing. In fact, outside of Krafft-Ebing, a couple of cases re- corded in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, and the last issue of Confidential, that’s about the most revealing thing I ever heard.”
There, I'd done it again; I had re- vealed myself. Lady Godiva had only one Peeping Tom, but I was sur- rounded by a host of them. I felt like a strip-teaser and—let’s face it— I’m not the type.
And then the questions flew at me from all sides: “Didn’t you ever read Hamlet?” “Don’t you know he hated his uncle because he loved Gertrude himself?” “What do you think Shake- speare meant by the play, anyhow?” “How about another martini?” (The last question came from the butler— bless him!—as he handed me a fresh
one. This one had both an olive and an onion, and is known as a double martini.)
“Just a second,” I said, as I took a sip. Refreshed, I returned to com- bat. “Now, then, let’s get this right. Yes, I’ve read Hamlet! And seen it, too—from Walter Hampden on the stage to Olivier in the films. As a matter of fact, after I saw the picture I went home and reread it just to see how Olivier got the notion: and I defy you to show me one word in the text to indicate Hamlet felt thataway about his mother. I did more: I dis- cussed the point with some Shake- spearean actors—Charles Coburn, for one—and they were as puzzled as I was. Mr. Coburn achieved his first fame in Shakespearean roles, and is steeped in Shakespearean lore; he assures me Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet thataway, and Burbage didn’t play it thataway.”
“Burbage - Schmurbage!” snarled the cobra. “In Germany they’ve been playing it that way since the turn of the century already.”
“Tf,” said the tall one, fixing a beady eye upon me, “if Hamlet wasn’t in love with his mother, why did he hate Claudius enough to want to kill him?”
“Look,” I said, “his father comes back from the grave, says he’s been bumped off by his brother, and asks his son to avenge him. Wouldn’t any son—”
“People don’t come back from the grave,” he interrupted sternly, “and anybody who pretends to have gone to college should know better. That was a daydream of Hamlet’s, in- vented by him to justify his guilt- feelings about his interest in his mother.”
“But Shakespeare has him come back,” I cried out.
“Shakespeare never went to col- lege!”
Wired for Sound?
That did it. “Nuts!” I quoted a fam- ous American general, and began to bash everything in sight. I was scotching snakes hip and thigh—and if that’s revealing, make the most of it—and would have been at it yet if those cops hadn’t butted in. The last thing I remember was one of the female demons saying, “Boy, would I like to analyze him!”
She can like all she wants, but, if she thinks she'll ever get me on that Procrustean Couch, she’s crazy. I don’t take that sort of treatment ly- ing down. If certain unmentionable things are hidden in my Unconscious, that’s okay with me. I'm not going to reveal another blessed thing. And, from what I’ve been reading, it would turn out that the couch was bugged by the Ford Foundation and that anything I said would be recorded for the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins and, for all I know, Prof. Kinsey.
They can get themselves another boy. Me—I’ve had enough. I've al- ready served the trauma with evic- tion papers and I am sending him to military school. I'm making anether three-year retreat to the w-mb. So long, folks; see you in 1958.
THE LAW OF THE LAND (Continued from p. 18)
” ” 66;
tion,” “assistance,” “instruction,” and not espionage. The Supreme Court has even forbidden trial judges to ask the jurors, until they are unanimous, how they stand on the issues. It would hardly seem that a trial judge acts judicially when he authorizes mi- crophone operators to learn what he himself is not entitled to know even in general outline.
The liability of the judge depends on the same principle. It is settled that judges may not be sued for acts done “in the exercise of the powers with which they are clothed,” no matter how outrageous, although they may be impeached. But was the judge clothed with the power—in a legal sense—to authorize this espio- nage?
Apparently the Department of Jus- tice does not think that the law at present is sufficiently clear to warrant prosecution, and has recommended new legislation. Query, whether the
_. public is not entitled to find out what
liability there is under present law? That could be done only by a prose- cution for contempt of court, the out- come of which would be uncer‘ain. Surely the judge and the professors who engaged in this remarkable ven- ture, with their passion for scientific data, would see the point. Or would they be so enthusiastic about an ex- periment in which they themselves were cast for the role of guinea pigs?
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 23
James Hagerty, the President’s minis- ter plenipotentiary to the press, was asked a fairly simple question during the week: Was it true that Mr. Eisen- hower might resign because of his cele- brated heart attack? Mr. Hagerty’s answer was fairly simple. “Nuts,” he said
This suggests two things. First, that Mr. Hagerty, at the altitude of his posi- tion, feels giddily uncorseted from the ordinary restraints of proper language. Second, and more flexibly, it suggests the level on which political reporting finds itself these days.
When slang is the easy vernacular of Executive comment to the press, you suspect a cozy relationship. And cozy is what it is. The job of reporting na- tional affairs is no longer the hectic province of eager young men fresh from the home city desk and bent upon prying facts loose no matter where they may be concealed. The job, like the job of government itself, has become bu- reaucratized. And in bureaucracies, whether they be governments, press corps, or reformatories, the secret of successful living is conformity. This has been achieved by the men of the Washington-Denver press corps, ex- cluding, of course, a few cranks whom we may dismiss as mere conservatives and therefore neither in the swim nor the know.
During the week, of course, some newsmen did tell a House Government Operations Subcommittee that they didn’t like the way government in- formation policies, particularly in the national security areas, have been tightening up on news. Mainly, how- ever, these are just the mutterings of newsmen who don’t know when they are well off. (One mutter was from James Reston of the New York Times. Having been known during the New and Fair Deals as a writer of “trial balloon” stories on important govern- ment policies, he now complains that government news sometimes is slanted. At Geneva Number One, Reston said, reporters — devoid of independent judgment? — had been “sold” the “of- ficial” version of the summit confer- ence’s “success.”)
24 NATIONAL REVIEW
The PRINTED Word
KARL HESS
Some newsmen, particularly those who rub shoulders with the great at the White House (wherever it may be at the moment) remain calm.
Over the week end, for instance, one of the virtual doyen of the breed, Mar- quis Childs, turned in a special report for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Mark” was in Geneva. But he was musing about home.
The Secretary of State, he mused, has “long suffered—certainly since the beginning of mass communication and mass opinion—from having to work in a goldfish bow] with millions of onlook- ers who are sure they know more about his job than he does.” More privacy, not more prying, is what seems to con- cern at least one correspondent. Childs goes on, however, to show what he can do with facts when they are available. Dulles, he wrote for the Post-Dispatch, has not been attacked like his prede- cessor Dean Acheson for two reasons, neither of which includes such Ache- sonian calisthenics as not turning his back on Alger Hiss. The reasons are: “the overwhelmingly favorable press of the Eisenhower Administration in general,” and the fact that Dulles has tried conscientiously to make himself accessible to working newspapermen, both at public press conferences and in background briefings.” That acces- sibility, presumably, differs from the one referred to in the goldfish sentence. Perhaps it must mean that only the unwashed public should be kept out of the Secretary’s goldfish bowl.
Other reporters were busy, mean- while, excluding the unwashed from other goldfish bowls for fear, perhaps, that a splash in them might disturb a concord of coverage.
The United Press, for instance, chose not to evoke any controversial memo- ries and simply reported that “Whit- taker Chambers, former Communist courier, who suffered a second heart attack last week was reported ‘slightly better’ today.”
The Associated Press, similarly, re- ported that a Professor Herbert Fuchs had been dropped from American Uni- versity because he had admitted being a Communist—but neglected to ex-
plain that this professor had admitted the association while testifying against his former comrades before a Congres- sional Committee.
With Polite Omissions
Everybody, of course, reported that Ford Motor Company stock would be offered to the public for the first time. They reported it, by and large, with polite omission of the fact that the Ford Foundation, whence will come that stock, is now involved with the bitter situation in which the $15,000,000 it gave to the Fund for the Republic is being used in what some people charit- ably call a “leftist” manner. The front page of the New York Journal- American, for instance, told in column two of the Ford stock sale. In column five it told of twenty-one persons with “yro-Red” backgrounds serving on a group backed by the Ford Founda- tion’s Fund for the Republic.
The Associated Press, largest wire service in the world, did its bit for understanding in the Fund for the Re- public story over the week end by dis- tributing a two-and-a-half column feature story on the Fund’s boss, Robert Hutchins. The story admitted attacks had been made against the Fund. But then it cited, as noncontro- versial fact, the worthy things the Fund was doing—including giving sup- port to the very group mentioned by the Journal-American as dominated by “pro-Reds.”
From London, though, the AP re- couped by stressing that the former Foreign Office official named as the “third man” in the Maclean-Burgess spy case “was known to have Commu- nist associations.” That fact seemed to have eluded the UP. Their angle: only that the “third man” had been “cleared” of tipping off the spies so they could escape.
Finally, there was Roscoe Drum- mond to bring a curtain of peace back down upon the reportorial scene. In his New York Herald-Tribune column, Drummond said that “President Eisen- hower’s over-riding hope—and ambi- tion—is to see the whole world realize the blessings of the peacefu! atom.” Only to Washington correspondents is given the power to know so surely what goes on in a President’s mind.
Perhaps, come to think of it, they see it all by gazing into Mr. Childs’ crystal goldfish bowl.
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Dr. Hutchins Reconsiders
For two decades, Dr. Robert M. Hut- chins has been one of the most able and energetic opponents of mere size and aggrandizement in American ed- ucational institutions. Though there happens to be a good deal in which I disagree with Mr. Hutchins, I think that this forceful gentleman has be- haved wisely and manfully in this. And last month, in an address to the American College of Hospital Admin- istrators, Dr. Hutchins observed that even he had not properly recognized, when he was President and Chancel- lor of the University of Chicago, the urgent necessity for conducting edu- cation on a truly human—that is, a personal, diminutive—scale. The ad- ministrative problem of the great cen- tralized university is insoluble, he said; and, besides, the whole structure of the typical American university “tends to self-defeating excesses in specialization, self-defeating in the sense that the specialist who knows nothing outside his specialty eventu- ally cannot succeed in it.”
So Mr. Hutchins has decided that his famous reorganization of the Uni- versity of Chicago was a mistake: he should have reorganized it “on the lines of Oxford and Cambridge.” (While this is a commendably candid confession, requiring courage, still it is somewhat alarming: one is led to reflect upon what mischief can be ac- complished, with the best of inten- tions, by a hasty, headstrong, almost reckless reformer like Mr. Hutchins, bursting with defecated self-confi- dence.) Well, Mr. Hutchins would have done this, he says, if he had thought twice:
The University should have been reconstituted into a federation of colleges, each representing among its students and teachers the major fields of learning. These colleges should have begun their work with the junior year, resting on the foun- dation of the College of the Univer-
' sity, which terminated its work at the end of the sophomore year. That college was intended to be the equi-
ay
RUSSELL KIRK
—— of the humanistic gymnasium
the lycée or the British public ocheal. The change would have meant that basic liberal education would have beer. followed by com- pulsory communication with the representatives of disciplines other than one’s own throughout the whole educational process, and, in the case of teachers, throughout their lives.
If ever the Fund for the Republic loses its tax-exemption along with its reputation (a consummation for which, I am informed, some people devoutly pray), perhaps Dr. Hutchins will go back to being a university pres- ident, for which work—despite cer- tain flaws of temper and learning—he is as well qualified as any man in this country. As an educator Dr. Hutchins, for the most part, was one of the con- servators of the wisdom of our ances- tors. As a species of publicist-tribune (which has been his role with the Fund for the Republic), he has not yet accomplished much except for re- peating, with more heat than light, the frayed slogans of the ritualistic Liberals. He is a strong, intelligent and resolute man; and I should like to see him on the side of the angels. No one could accomplish more to humanize our institutions of higher learning, now infatuated with material aggran- dizement, and swollen to grotesque proportions.
Something else in Dr. Hutchins’ speech to the Hospital Administrators was remarkably interesting: his ob- servations on patience. He acted too hastily and willfully at Chicago, he suggests:
I now think that my lack of pa- tience was one of my principal dis - qualifications as an administrator ... Representations were made from the floor that a decision on a central issue should not be reached by an evenly divided faculty. These rep- resentations I ignored; I had
votes I needed . . . The pressure of time is so great, the number of peo- ple who have to be convinced is so large, interminable discussion of the same subject with the same people is so boring, that the amount of pa- tience a university administrator
must have passes the +o ap of ing imagination, to say nothing of
of my temperament. But I = learned at last, or I think I have, that the university president who wants durable action, not just ac- tion, must have patience, and have it in this amount.
Well! Whether one agrees with him or not, this a Man speaking. Possibly Mr. Hutchins rather vitiates his manly admission by mentioning in the same address (“The Administrator Recon- sidered”) that the cause of his repent- ance is substantially pragmatic: “I should have known that the existence of a large embittered minority, which felt that fundamental alterations had been pushed through without consid- eration of its point of view, destined the alterations to endure only until the minority could muster the strength to become the majority.”
Yet, wrathy though Dr. Hutchins often makes me, I do not count myself among his enemies. If sometimes he has been an energumen, more often he has been an angel of light. If he has treated some people with thor- ough injustice, still he has protected other people who deserved help—and has acted courageously in this last. His speech to the Hospital Adminis- trators may be a sign that Mr. Hut- chins (whose career has been a series or cycle of curious and inconsistent episodes) may now be passing into yet another mood. If indeed he is ex- periencing second thoughts, I wish he would make honorable amends to cer- tain people. And the first of those to whom he ought to do tardy justice is Mr. W. T. Couch, formerly director of the University of Chicago Press, whom Mr. Hutchins summarily dismissed in one of his fits of ill-temper and impa- tience. I give one explanation of the Couch affair in my Academic Free- dom; Dr. E. Merrill Root offers a somewhat different explanation in his Collectivism on the Campus. Mr. Hut- chins himself never has condescended to give any explanation to anyone— not even to Mr. Couch. It is all very well to repent of impatience in general; it is better still to make amends for some impatience in particular.
Everyone ought to listen to what Dr. Hutchins says. For good or ill, he is a power in the land. And I hope that he may still fulfill his part in the restoration of learning, rather than posing as John Stuart Mill redivivus.
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 25
In California, where I have been exiled for my sins, the theater, I regret to re- port, is only a minor incident in peo- ple’s lives. The graybeards tell me it wasn’t always thus: there was a time when San Francisco and Los Angeles were exciting show towns, and the youngsters got the same thrills from the theater as the kids of New York. But that’s no longer true. When the California teen-ager says “show,” he means a film; when he says “theater,” he means Grauman’s Chinese.
Not that we don’t get shows, and good ones. Los Angeles has the Bilt- more, which gets a fair share of the road dramas, and the Philharmonic, where the enterprising Ed Lester puts on, with grace and distinction, the more popular musicals; Pasadena has its famed Community Playhouse; even Beverly Hills has a nearby theater. But you rarely hear anyone say excitedly, “We're going to the theater Saturday night.” There are many of our friends who never see a legitimate attraction. And, when you live in a community, you tend to fall into its ways; if the people you are fond of don’t go to shows, you don’t go with them, as Sam Goldwyn might say.
But every two years or so, you make that New York trip—and you find the old lure comes back. You begin plan- ning, long before you actually board the train or plane, what shows you are going to see. You buy a Sunday New York Times to see what’s playing, and you begin to figure out what you’re going to see. You'll have only two weeks, and you'll want to see your family and your old friends, and that won't leave many evenings. You can count on, say, three free nights for the theater and you want to spend those wisely. Above all, you want to have fun.
As I grow older—though, unfortu- nately, not mellower—there seem to me fewer and fewer tenets that I find myself prepared to give battle for: woman suffrage, the direct election of United States Senators, the initiative and the referendum, all of which causes I passionately embraced, have all been effected and the utopia they promised seems to me just as far away as ever—maybe farther. But
26 NATIONAL REVIEW
ARTS and MANNERS
one article of faith remains, resplend- ent as it was in my youth: the theater must be Fun. There is an obvious cor- ollary, too: if it isn’t Fun, it isn’t Theater.
To a youngster born in New York, the theater was Glamor and Romance and Adventure—and above all, Fun. The boys in my circle couldn’t afford to go often, but, if you saved your pen- nies, you eventually landed in the gal- lery and had the greatest thrill in the world: seeing a show. Whether it was a Victor Herbert operetta or a Eugene Walter melodrama, you lived it to the hilt. And, when the curtain came down for the last time, you took with you enough precious memories to last you until the next time—for which you im- mediately began to save. You could forego the sodas and the apples-on-a- stick because you were saving for something that was More Fun. Once in a blue moon you hit the jackpot: a press-agent for a play that wasn’t do- ing too well would put a placard ad- vertising its merits in the window of your father’s store, and in exchange your dad would get two balcony seats; and then either Pop or Mom would take you (they couldn’t go together because one of ’em had to take care of the store). And you were the envy of the other kids on the block whose fa- thers weren’t fortunate enough to own a stationery store.
I daresay we applauded plays that didn’t hew to the classic principles of unity; but if the heroine was kind and beautiful (and, from where we sat, there never was a plain heroine), and the leading man noble, and the villain ruthless, and virtue triumphed in the end, the catharsis we suffered was as poignant as though the playwright had abided by all the Aristotelian precepts. And we were devout Aristotelians in one respect: we identified ourselves completely with the author’s charac- ters, especially the hero. We loved and suffered and sacrificed with him; and, when the dastardly villain was about to snuff out his life, it was our body English, as much as his own super- human struggles, that unloosed his bonds in the nick of time.
And we had one great advantage over the modern playgoer: we never
saw a bad play. My guess is that nobody ever wrote one in those golden days.
With that sort of background, you comb the list of plays that will be avail- able and you immediately start scratching off the list:
1. Opening nights. Opening nights are what take the fun out of the thea- ter, and, as a man who has gone through some agonizing ones, I am all in favor of abolishing them. Don’t ask me how: just do it, that’s all. I will per- sonally guarantee to deliver the com- bined votes of every playwright, man- ager, actor and chorus girl in America to the Presidential candidate who will make that part of his platform in 1956. All the other candidates would then receive would be the votes of the crit- ics. We'd carry every state.
2. Any play whose chief claim to fame is a succession of four-letter words: my gang knew most of the words, and might even use them occa- sionally—but it would never have oc- curred to any of us to use them in the theater. The theater wasn’t church, exactly, but in its own way it was sa- cred and not to be profaned.
3. Plays about the plight of homo-
‘ sexuals. This isn’t just prudishness on
my part; but I think it’s been overdone. Almost every other novel and every other play deals in some measure with this subject, and I’m afraid when you’ve seen one homosexual, you’ve seen them all. How about paying at- tention to the minorities? Normal peo- ple have problems, too.
So here’s what I saw:
a. The Teahouse of the August Moon—and I’m not going to “review” it at this late date. I could have seen this one in Los Angeles, but the Bilt- more is away downtown, and it takes half an hour to get there, and the park- ing problem is frightful. Why it is eas- ier to come three thousand miles to see it I don’t know, but there you are. Any- way, I’m glad I came. It was sheer joy: it was obviously fun for the actors to play, it was fun for the audience to watch, and I even suspect—though I should know better—that it was fun to write.
b. The incomparable Victor Borge in his one-man show. And c) a movie: The Truth About Harry, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock. We knighted him right after we saw the picture.
This trip has been fun. MORRIE RYSKIND
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_ BOOKS IN REVIEW _
Sorry Triumph
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
The thesis of Horace Coon’s Triumph of the Eggheads (Random House, $4) is that the United States is periodically saved by incursion of in- tellectuals into politics. Well, so be it; nothing is ever saved for very long by the absence of brains. But Mr. Coon gets his brainy folk and his fools all mixed up. What Mr. Coon seems to miss is that no man becomes a true intellectual by act of mere self-certification. A man may bé a Ph.D. and still not know enough to come in when it rains; he may call himself an intellectual, but this fact does not automatically grant him in- telligence. And it is the mark of the true “egghead” that intelligence is the one thing that is totally absent from his make-up whatever his pre-
tensions to scholarship.
Mr. Coon ducks the issue—and ignores the popular origin of the term —by defining egghead to suit himself. An egghead, he says, is “an adult who believes in intelligence as an instrument for social change, who be- lieves in reason and rationality as a test for evaluating political issues.” Don’t we all! But Mr. Coon’s own qualifications for recognizing an in- telligent man are about as dubious as his talent for lexicography. Be- fore going on to his schematization of American history—which amounts
to saying that Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson represent 14-karat gold where all else save Abraham Lincoln and George Washington is dross—I would like to do a little textual analy- sis of some of his sentences, and also pay my respects to some of his mis- takes. This way of beginning a review is perhaps unfair, but when a man sets himself up as an arbiter of intelli- gence, it is only natural to ask for his credentials. And Mr. Coon’s creden- tials, on the face of it, aren’t very convincing.
On page 15 of his book Mr. Coon says that Louis D. Brandeis believed in “regulated competition [and] un- hampered enterprise.” Well, it is news to me that you can unhamper something by regulating it. On page 36 he refers to the Louisiana Purchase and goes on to say that “it opened up the most tremendous WPA project since the building of the Pyramids.” Tie that one if you can! Confronted with the history of thousands of pio- neers who built Conestoga wagons and flatboats, fought Indians and bears, and broke the tough prairie
sod without benefit of central direc- tion or command, our imaginative author falls back on an analogy that connotes slavery and the divine right of Pharaohs. A more cockeyed anal- ogy I have never seen.
As I read on in Mr. Coon’s book I kept longing to see what Isabel Pater- son, whose talent for textual analysis far exceeds my own, would do to Mr. Coon’s sentences. What would she do, for example, to the passage which avers that John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Commodore Vanderbilt created an “imperialistic” nation? Rockefeller created an oil business, Carnegie forged a steel busi- ness and built libraries and peace pal- aces, and Vanderbilt dealt in rail- roads. Surely these acts had nothing whatsoever to do with starting the Spanish-American War or seizing the Philippines or grabbing the route for the Panama Canal or instituting dol- lar diplomacy, things which would logically come under the heading of “imperialism.”
The truth is that Mr. Coon just doesn’t know how to use words. Nor does he know how te check his facts.
On page 22, writing of the year 1912, he says “W. B. Yeats said that he could hear the fiddles tuning up all over America.” He must have got the quotation from Van Wyck Brooks, but Mr. Brooks attributed it not to William Butler Yeats but to Yeats’ brother Jack. On page 67 he speaks of the muckrakers paving the way for the reformers Newton D. Baker, Brand Whitlock and Frederic C. Howe. This is a flat contradiction of the fact that Baker, Whitlock and Howe derived from the Single Tax movement, which preceded the muck- rakers in point of time. Baker worked for Tom L. Johnson, the Henry George mayor of Cleveland who took office in 1901. Brand Whitlock was originally a secretary to “Golden Rule” Jones, who became mayor of Toledo in 1897. The muckrakers first got going in late 1902, when Sam McClure printed the first installment of Ida Tarbell’s “History of the Stand- ard Oil Company” in McClure’s Mag- azine. Lincoln Steffens’ first muck- rake article, “Tweed Days in St. Louis,” was also printed in late 1902. So who “paved the way” for whom? Isn’t it the fact that the Single Tax reformers paved the way for the muckrakers?
Careless to the last, Mr. Coon says elsewhere that “in 1896 a small group of professors stuck out their necks publicly by endorsing Cleveland.” Of course he probably meant to say Bryan, who stole the Democratic Party from Cleveland in 1896. Such a minor error wouldn’t matter if it stood alone. Unfortunately, none of Mr. Coon’s mistakes stands sufficiently alone to give the reader any confi- dence that our author knows his chosen field. Who knows, maybe he meant to say “Cleveland” after all.
Having concentrated on Mr. Coon’s credentials as an intellect and a re- searcher, we may now go on, if we are gluttons for punishment, to his particular version of American his- tory. The biggest mistake Mr. Coon makes is to assume that it is the poli- ticians who have made America tick. The name of Henry Ford, who insti-
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 27
tuted the five-dollar day in an era when five dollars was worth a great deal more than now, is not mentioned in the index. But Franklin D. Roose- velt is commended for getting rid of sweatshops. Well, who actually got rid of the sweatshops, the politicians who passed laws or the industrialists who first showed how labor could become more and more productive with better tools under a rising pay scale? Mr. Coon makes much of the fact that no “intellectuals” reached the White House between the time of the Civil War and the time of Wood- row Wilson. Overlooking the implica- tion that Cleveland was brainless, the reason for this is that people of intel- ligence during that long and happy period knew that first things must come first. They were busy building a nation by a grandly concerted effort that was pretty much unhampered by the politicos, and who shall say that they were wrong? If the railroads and the factories hadn’t been built, the “egghead” Woodrow Wilson wouldn’t have had an America to “reform.” And he certainly would not have had a nation capable of tipping the bal- ance in World War One.
The second biggest mistake made by Mr. Coon is to assume that Frank- lin D. Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson are to be classed as intellects. Frank- lin Roosevelt was a consummate poli- ticlan who knew how to use profes- sors and experts to gain his own ends, but actually he cared very little for any of the intellectual disciplines which delight your true egghead. As for Stevenson, he has a style that can make much of little. He charms, he amuses—but, after all, what has he ever said that sticks in your mind for ten minutes? I know that he is for peace and for prosperity and for the farmer and for other unexceptionable things, but so is your Aunt Minnie, who wouldn’t qualify as an egghead under Mr. Coon’s peculiar definition in forty years.
One final depressing thing about Mr. Coon’s book is that it has been written several times before. I myself wrote a version of it in 1932. Herbert Agar wrote another version of it called Pursuit of Happiness: the Story of the Democratic Party in the late thirties. And there have been innum- erable other versions. The recipe is standard. First, you let politica) his- tory do duty for all history. Second,
28 NATIONAL REVIEW
you define “intellect” in a way that excludes the brain power of most. of the human race. Third, you look for devils, whether they are “malefactors of great wealth” or Joe McCarthy. Finally, you set your “intellectuals” against your “devils” in order to cre- ate the illusion of drama, and you have your book. Meanwhile the dark fields of the Republic, to quote Scott Fitzgerald, roll on under the stars, and people generally live their lives without thinking of politics more than ten minutes a day. Would you have it different? Then go to a totalitarian country where the politicians will make you think of them every waking hour.
The Paradox of France
France Against Herself, by Herbert Luethy. 476 pp. New York: Praeger. $6.50
Friends and lovers of France see in her a beloved mistress, whom age cannot wither nor custom stale; and, on a loftier plane, the fount of West- ern civilization and the voice of Eu- rope. Others, disillusioned by closer acquaintance as GI’s, or travelers and students with little money, see in her the plump black-clad patronne of a small restaurant, hotel or store, count- ing the money in the till, overcharg- ing the customers and bullying the overworked and underpaid help.
Neither the fair nor the mean visage of France is either true or false. And the Swiss author of France Against Herself looks beyond both, combining appreciation of the French people’s enduring charms and human and cul- tural qualities with realistic under- standing of France’s economic, social, political and moral weaknesses. He has written a comprehensive and il- luminating book, which exposes and makes intelligible the paradox of France.
Luethy’s F ~nce is a country that believes in the universality of her civ- ilization, yet is “fundamentally con- cerned only with herself.” Her parish- pump politics and her dependence on American subsidies stand in sharp contrast to her pretensions to gran- deur and to her claim to preside over the defense of Europe. She is a con- servative country with a revolution- ary ideology, she has no liberal tra-
dition, lacks even such an elementary civil liberty as habeas corpus, and pays and houses her industrial work- ers worse than any other country in western Europe. Her people’s clarity and logic of thought are proverbial, yet she is incapable of facing up to realities in the sphere of economics and foreign affairs. Her present ossi- fied economy vouchsafes more privi- leges and monopolies to more people than did that of her own ancien ré- gime. Her governments do not govern, and she is administered by a “Manda- rin type” of self-recruiting bureau- cracy that has remained basically un- changed since the days of the feudal monarchy, is responsible to no one outside its own hierarchy, and fru- strates the purpose of new legislation by interpreting it “in the light of de- crees or regulations issued by Francis I or Louis XIII.” “The apparatus of the absolute monarchy,” Luethy writes, “whose power was increased by Napoleon is still today a monarch, whose driving force is routine.” Centuries of centralized administra- tion have systematically deprived French local communities of the slightest initiative in either economic, social or public health fields. “Local councils cannot have a water pipe laid, or a street paved, or a roof re- paired, without the official endorse- ment of the authorities at six levels of the central administration.” The Min- istry of Interior acts independently of the Ministers; the latter come and go, and have no power to dismiss the hundred prefects who actually run the country. The political parties, which run elections and rotate in office as the ostensible government, affect mat- ters only “in the realm of ideology.”
In the economic sphere as well, France is still in many respects a me- dieval country with a mercantilist policy. Peasant France has no organ- ized provincial markets at all. The an- cient Paris Halles, which lacks even direct access to a railway, has pre- served its seven-hundred-year mono- poly as the agricultural market for the whole country. As much as a third of the produce sent to Paris from the provinces goes back to them, burdened with the huge costs of unnecessary handling, middlemen’s markups at ev- ery stage, and huge losses from the spoiling of vegetables and meat.
This is only one of Luethy’s many
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examples of France’s obsolete meth- ods of production and distribution. Her sheltered, protected, guild and patronage economy of acquired privi- leges is “without an engine but well provided with brakes”; it is based not on free competition but on the protec- tion of situations acquises, sheltered from the outside world by tariffs and quotas and a closed colonial market. “The law of French capitalism,” he writes, “seems to be to prevent the death of antiquated enterprises” by keeping prices high and wages low. “All the forces and mechanisms of the liberal economy have been eliminated by law” to produce a “national econ- omy of self-controlled stagnation .. . in which everything new and progres- sive is heavily taxed while everything old and traditional is exempt.”
This caricature of capitalism helps, on Luethy’s showing, to explain France’s five million Communist vot- ers. “The French workers and the left intelligentsia . . . take what they see before their eyes to be capitalism, and, as the great mass of its benefi- ciaries claim that it is a liberal econ- omy, they naturally want the oppo- site.” Yet capitalism would “be more revolutionary in France than a totally planned economy.” As Luethy ex- plains, “When all voluntary forces fail, when entrepreneurs no longer show enterprise, when capitalists refrain from investment and the most urgent national tasks-remain undone, the idea of compulsion and dictatorship loses its terrors in the eyes of millions of people.”
There are, of course, other reasons for the strength of the Communists in France. Communism has established itself naturally in the ideologi- cal world of the French Left, Luetby thinks, because “it is the spirit of its spirit.” “The ossified absolutist state structure and the ossified ideology of Jacobin republicanism belong together as parts of the same historical herit- age, and both are equally remote from liberal democracy.” In the world of “ideological abstractions and romantic historical pictures” in which the ¥rench Left lives, the revolution which started in France a hundred and fifty years ago is believed to have been completed in Russia.
Luethy’s approach to the problem of France, which has begun to exasper- ate even that patient beast of burden, the American taxpayer, is that of a
surgeon who hopes to save the life of a friend by convincing him of the ne- cessity for an operation. He lives in France and appreciates to the full the douceur de vivre so attractive to for- eigners seeking an escape from the disciplines of their own cultures, but incompatible with the imperatives of survival in the modern world.
FREDA UTLEY
Motion from the Floor
The Thaw, by Ilya Ehrenburg. With a speciai supplement on “The Death of Art,” by Russell Kirk. 230 pp. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. $3.50
The Thaw may be called a novel only in the sense in which a prefabricated dwelling may be called a home. And as a novel, I cannot imagine anyone’s caring to pick it up, since it is every- thing Mr. Kirk’s essay calls it: mousy, superficial, timorous, boring.
But read for what it really is, a piece of legislation, a motion from the floor submitted to the Union of Soviet Writers in the form of a parable by one of their senior members, it is fas- cinating, uniquely perverted, and— well, not quite so sad as Mr. Kirk thinks.
What if, in this A.D. 1955, someone were to publish a book which seri- ously, almost prophetically, said, “Gentlemen, the wheel does exist. Look at all the cars going by.” What would readers say? What could they say? Yet on page 4, Comrade Ehren- burg urges no less anachronistic a thesis: “The way I look at it,” says his text, “a human being has a heart.”
Which his parable then demon- strates:
An engineer in a precision-tool factory falls in love with his boss’ wife. She reciprocates, and both are promptly miserable. That anything so personal, indulgent, involuntary, and very undialectically immaterial should enter their lives and threaten their factory’s production schedule, shocks them. They deny their feelings, and endure a winter of guilt and repres- sion. Then one fine spring day they meet on the street, and miraculously, gracefully, in spite of themselves and their conviction that l’amor che muove il sol was replaced in 1918 by a Cen- tral Committee, they enter a hallway
and there, more than biologically, they kiss.
For this Ehrenburg was called down, and at the Second Congress of Soviet Writers last December, he apologized. This is bleak, of course, and enough to make Mr. Kirk write thirty-one gloomy pages on the death of art. But I don’t think he need des- pair so completely. After all, it was at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 that Isaac Babel, a true poet who was never merely a literary bu- reaucrat, threw in the sponge alto- gether and ironically called himself “the master of silence.” Ehrenburg may have only been lifting a moist- ened finger to the wind. He has, nev- ertheless, broken that terrible silence for the first time.
Human beings have probably never made so ponderous a mistake as swal- lowing the Marxist half-truths whole. But, thank God, man has always con- tained more than he merely thought he knew. Given enough time, enough grace, he’ll survive the effects even of his most glutinous gullibility. In an- other twenty years, we may even be able to find a heartening aspect of the Soviet chapter in man’s folly. And what else could establish so over- whelmingly how much poison man can absorb, suffer, mithridate himself against, and, finally, live to tell the tale? ROBERT PHELPS
Croce on Liberty
History and Liberty: The Historical Writings of Benedetto Croce, by A. Robert Caponigri. 284 pp. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. $4.00
The work of Benedetto Croce has been a powerful force against that worm’s- eye view of history that would deny meaning and purpose to the human experience, and make of it a drab tale of occurrences. His influence is per- vasive, but his work itself, particular- ly his historical work, is not well known by this generation.
Professor Caponigri’s book is, there- fore, much to be welcomed; and though the manner of his presentation does not make for the greatest ease in reading, it is original and effective. Drawing only lightly upon Croce’s explicitly theoretical works, he exhib- its the unfolding of Croce’s historical theory as a succession of dialectical
NOVEMBER 19, 1955 29
moments, represented by the major phases of his historical writings. His method is Crocean (not to say Hegel- ian) and if I do not mistake his in- tent, he wishes us to think of the phases set off by these moments as thesis, antithesis and synthesis:
In The Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 and The History of the Realm of Naples, “Croce achieves the ethico- political view of history,” the concept of history as the activity of the human spirit. The History of the Baroque Era is presented as “the anatomy of deca- dence”-—as a negative moment, which deepens this concept and, out of its very negativity, gives birth to the crowning concept of the Crocean his- torical view. The latter is realized in The History of Europe in the 19th Century and The History of Italy: 1871-1914, where the ethico-political striving of the spirit is seen as the striving for liberty, and history as “the history of liberty.”
Well and good. The nobility of the figure of Croce himself—philosopher, historian, statesman, in an age of grubbing specialization — commands our admiration. But with the central theme of liberty, as with certain minor themes, the author might, by trying to set Croce’s idealism in the perspective of the long Western discourse between realism and idealism, have made it easier to come to grips with the pro- tean flow of Croce’s thought.
And in a book for American read- ers, he might have been well advised to take account of the contrast be- tween Croce’s notion of liberty and that of the Anglo-American political tradition. A mind nurtured in this tra- dition must perforce ask: What is this “liberty” that has no rational nor uni-
To order any book reviewed in this book section, write: THE BOOKMAILER Box 101, Murray Hill Station New York 16, N. Y. Return mail service—postpaid PAY ONLY BOOKSTORE PRICE
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30 NATIONAL REVIEW
versal principle, and is to be found only in the actual historical develop- ment of society? Where is the liberty of the individual person, living in the tension between his spiritual being and the real natural world, if liberty is but the working of collective spirit to an ideal end?
To wish that such questions had been considered in the light of Croce’s outlook, however, is by no means to detract from the excellence with which a difficult task of interpretation has been carried out within its own terms. What Professor Caponigri gives us is eminently worth while as it stands.
FRANK S. MEYER
Portrait of a Saint
My Life for My Sheep: A Biography of Thomas 4 Becket, by Alfred Duggan. 341 pp. New York: Coward- McCann. $5.00
The contest between Henry II and Saint Thomas 4 Becket was vast and complicated. Their long, angry war of wills summed up the drama in Church and State and in the entire life of the years of transition leading to the high Middle Ages. The murder of Becket in 1170 and his quick canonization three years later provided England and all Europe with a classic example of the meaning of tyranny on the one hand, and of loyalty to principle on the other.
Deliberately and studiously, Alfred Duggan avoids restating the general lessons that the famous King and the heroic Archbishop taught. The sharp personal focus of his narrative ex- cludes lengthy historical exposition and philosophic theorizing. Public issues are, so to speak, kept offstage. And the author avoids the kind of “rich-colored pageantry” and “por- traiture of an age” that envelop ordi- nary historical novels and pseudo- biographies with a masquerade for romantic escape.
The somewhat bare and predomi- nantly dramatic form of the book re- quires almost reckless daring and de- cisiveness from the writer. He has to decide what these people are like, out- wardly and inwardly. They can never be vaguely lost in their circumstances. At every step in the story, each must make a living, personal choice. No statistics or historical tendencies of
the times or balanced and tentative suppositions can relieve the author and his characters of motive.
Has someone now, several hundred years later, judged correctly the per- sonalities of Saint Thomas 4 Becket and of King Henry Il? They appear consistent and persuasive; although partial, because the picture is focused so strongly upon the immediate, in- dividual relations of the two leaders with one another.
Thomas a4 Becket is one of those saints whose way of life altered radi- cally at a fairly late moment in life. He changed from a very grand chan- cellor, serving his king with remark- able worldly wisdom, into an ascetic priest and archbishop. As Primate of England, he fought the King with a disregard of worldly prudence that threw Church and State and private consciences throughout Europe into dreadful turmoil. But there was far less inconsistency reflected in this “conversion” than superficial observa- tion might indicate.
The book shows the immense Arch- bishop (physically, “the tallest bishop in Christendom”; morally, victor over the strongest king England had ever known) as a man of tremendous but miraculously governed temper. He had great intellectual powers and huge talents, but only the slightest imagi- nation. He iived, in all the various stages of his career, the magnified, amplified pattern of the position he held. Henry could angrily say: “Thomas was an actor, always stand- ing back to look at himself, watching himself perform the functions of the great office his talents had obtained for him.”
But also, we see, he did give him- self to his roles: “He hardly thought of himself as a person . . .” He was surprised at, and had to be reminded of, the universal public reputation which his actions aroused.
Thomas a Becket made partisans of all his contemporaries, from peasants to kings and popes. But this cannot be explained uniquely in terms of his actions. In his position and struggle he had disregard for self, and in turn was gifted with a charisma that has made him visible down the centuries. For what he was combined with what he did to bring him to the final role of martyr. He proved he could play it with the perfection of a saint.
PHILIP BURNHAM
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For a healthy democracy, it is essential that all viewpoints be represented by strong and intelli- gent voices in the market place of ideas. The estab- lishment of NATIONAL REVIEW gives promise that the conservative viewpoint will be ably repre- sented and will make an important contribution to the clarification of issues in the public mind. CECIL B. DE MILLE
Never, throughout the life of our Republic, have our people needed the unvarnished truth as we need it today. This truth—stripped of unnecessary verbiage—will be found in NATIONAL REVIEW ... a major contribution toward the preservation of our liberty. BONNER FELLERS
Best wishes for every success. May NATIONAL RE- VIEW decimate all Communists, international So- cialists and misguided idealists who are endeavor- ing to make us a bankrupt nation of total con- formists. They must be fully exposed before they still further dominate government, education, labor, press and even business... . SPRUILLE BRADEN
To the millions of conservatives who have suffered from inarticulateness over the years, NATIONAL REVIEW holds forth the promise of providing them with a forceful intelligent voice.
CHARLES EDISON
It is most heartening to learn that a true conserva- tive weekly of opinion is to be published. Our country desperately needs such a paper. My con- gratulations. J. HOWARD PEW
Every .good wish for the success of the new NA- TIONAL REVIEW. People of conservative opinion have far too few media for expression. May NA- TIONAL REVIEW prosper and bring its message to all the people of our country. GENE TUNNEY
Success to NATIONAL REVIEW. I am sure that it will be a vindication of the principle of a truly free press. There is room for an... organ in which the basic truths of our civilization . . . can be vigor- ously expressed. FATHER JAMES M. GILLIS, C.S.P.
One glaring difference between conservatives and modern-day Liberals is that the conservatives build and the Liberals talk. I have a belief that NATIONAL REVIEW may help us find our voice. JAMES P. SELVAGE
My best wishes for the success of NATIONAL RE- VIEW. It is certainly needed. VIVIEN KELLEMS
I congratulate you ...on the great public service you are rendering in launching NATIONAL REVIEW. This is a most encouraging venture to fill an ur- gent need. DONALD R. RICHBERG